Automatically create and renew website SSL certificates using the Let's Encrypt free certificate authority and its client certbot. Built on top of the official Nginx Docker images (both Debian and Alpine), and uses OpenSSL/LibreSSL to automatically create the Diffie-Hellman parameters used during the initial handshake of some ciphers.
ℹ️ The very first time this container is started it might take a long time before before it is ready to respond to requests. Read more about this in the Diffie-Hellman parameters section.
ℹ️ Please use a specific tag when doing a Docker pull, since
:latest
might not always be 100% stable.
- Handles multiple server names when requesting certificates (i.e. both
example.com
andwww.example.com
). - Handles wildcard domain request in case you use DNS authentication.
- Can request both RSA and ECDSA certificates (at the same time).
- Will create Diffie-Hellman parameters if they are defined.
- Uses the parent container's
/docker-entrypoint.d/
folder. - Will report correct exit code when stopped/killed/failed.
- You can do a live reload of configs by sending in a
SIGHUP
signal (no container restart needed). - Possibility to use this image offline with the help of a local CA.
- Both Debian and Alpine images built for multiple architectures.
This container requests SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt, with the help of their certbot script, which they provide for the absolutely bargain price of free! If you like what they do, please donate.
This repository was originally forked from @henridwyer
by
@staticfloat
, before it was forked again by me. However, the changes to
the code has since become so significant that this has now been detached as its
own independent repository (while still retaining all the history). Migration
instructions, from @staticfloat
's image, can be found
here.
-
This guide expects you to already own a domain which points at the correct IP address, and that you have both port
80
and443
correctly forwarded if you are behind NAT. Otherwise I recommend DuckDNS as a Dynamic DNS provider, and then either search on how to port forward on your router or maybe find it here. -
I suggest you read at least the first two sections in the Good to Know documentation, since this will give you some important tips on how to create a basic server config, and how to use the Let's Encrypt staging servers in order to not get rate limited.
-
I don't think it is necessary to mention if you managed to find this repository, but you will need to have Docker installed for this to function.
CERTBOT_EMAIL
: Your e-mail address. Used by Let's Encrypt to contact you in case of security issues.
DHPARAM_SIZE
: The size of the Diffie-Hellman parameters (default:2048
)ELLIPTIC_CURVE
: The size/curve of the ECDSA keys (default:secp256r1
)RENEWAL_INTERVAL
: Time interval between certbot's renewal checks (default:8d
)RSA_KEY_SIZE
: The size of the RSA encryption keys (default:2048
)STAGING
: Set to1
to use Let's Encrypt's staging servers (default:0
)USE_ECDSA
: Set to0
to have certbot use RSA instead of ECDSA (default:1
)
CERTBOT_AUTHENTICATOR
: The authenticator plugin to use when responding to challenges (default:webroot
)CERTBOT_DNS_PROPAGATION_SECONDS
: The number of seconds to wait for the DNS challenge to propagate (default: certbot's default)DEBUG
: Set to1
to enable debug messages and use thenginx-debug
binary (default:0
)USE_LOCAL_CA
: Set to1
to enable the use of a local certificate authority (default:0
)
/etc/letsencrypt
: Stores the obtained certificates and the Diffie-Hellman parameters
Create your own user_conf.d/
folder and place all of you custom server config files in there. When done you
can just start the container with the following command
(available tags):
docker run -it -p 80:80 -p 443:443 \
--env CERTBOT_EMAIL=your@email.org \
-v $(pwd)/nginx_secrets:/etc/letsencrypt \
-v $(pwd)/user_conf.d:/etc/nginx/user_conf.d:ro \
--name nginx-certbot jonasal/nginx-certbot:latest
You should be able to detach from the container by holding
Ctrl
and pressingp
+q
after each other.
As was mentioned in the introduction; the very first time this container is
started it might take a long time before before it is ready to
respond to requests, please
be a little bit patient. If you change any of the config files after the
container is ready, you can just
send in a SIGHUP
to tell
the scripts and Nginx to reload everything.
docker kill --signal=HUP <container_name>
An example of a docker-compose.yaml
file can
be found in the examples/
folder. The default parameters that
are found inside the nginx-certbot.env
file
will be overwritten by any environment variables you set inside the .yaml
file.
NOTE: You can use both
environment:
andenv_file:
together or only one of them, the only requirement is thatCERTBOT_EMAIL
is defined somewhere.
Like in the example above, you just need to place your custom server configs
inside your user_conf.d/
folder beforehand. Then you start it all with the following command.
docker-compose up
This option is for if you make your own Dockerfile
. Check out which tags that
are available in this document, or on
Docker Hub, and then choose how specific you want to be.
In this case it is possible to completely skip the
user_conf.d/
folder and just
write your files directly into Nginx's conf.d/
folder. This way you can
replace the files I have built into the image with your
own. However, if you do that please take a moment to understand what they do,
and what you need to include in order for certbot to continue working.
FROM jonasal/nginx-certbot:latest
COPY conf.d/* /etc/nginx/conf.d/
We make use of BATS to test parts of this codebase. The easiest way to run all the tests is to execute the following command in the root of this repository:
docker run -it --rm -v "$(pwd):/workdir" ffurrer/bats:latest ./tests
NOTE: This image used here is based on
alpine
which makes use of busyboxsort
instead of the coreutils one, and the default sorting order handles*
differently, so the tests might thus fail if run on something else.
Here is a collection of links to other resources that provide useful information.
- Good to Know
- A lot of good to know stuff about this image and the features it provides.
- Changelog
- List of all the tagged versions of this repository, as well as bullet points to what has changed between the releases.
- DockerHub Tags
- All the tags available from Docker Hub.
- Advanced Usage
- Information about the more advanced features this image provides.
- Certbot Authenticators
- Information on the different authenticators that are available in this image.
- Nginx Tips
- Some interesting tips on how Nginx can be configured.
Here is a list of projects that use this image in various creative ways. Take a look and see if one of these helps or inspires you to do something similar: