update: keeping your let’s encrypt certs up-to-date

Last year I posted a simple script for keeping your Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates current.

In conjunction with my last post sharing the “best” SSL configs you can use with Apache on CentOS, here is the current state of the cron’d renewal script I use.

systemctl stop httpd.service
systemctl stop postfix
~/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto -t -n --agree-tos --keep --expand --standalone certonly --rsa-key-size 4096 -m user@domain.tld -d domain.tld
# you can append more [sub]domains to a single cert with additional `-d` directives ([-d otherdomain.tld [-d sub.domain.tld...]])
#...repeat for every domain / domain group
systemctl start httpd.service
systemctl start postfix

I have this script running @weekly in cron. You should be able to get away with doing it only every month or two .. but I like to err on the side of caution.

I’m stopping and starting Postfix in addition to httpd (Apache on my system) for only two reasons: first, I am using some of the LE-issued certs in conjunction with my Postfix install; second, because I don’t know if Dovecot and my webmail system need to make sure Postfix is restarted if underlying certs change.