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Comment by noja | Hacker News Reader

Don't touch my OS! If you want to install some packages, tell me to install them (or ask me!). I don't like this script so far.

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You ran a setup script, as root, without looking at it and are upset it installed things? Shouldn't you be more upset that you didn't take the time to look at what it does before running it as root?

It's standard behaviour for a script to exit with an error if it can't find the dependencies it needs to run.

letsencrypt-auto is specifically there to setup and update the entire environment for letsencrypt to work. If you don't run it as root, you get prompted to elevate. If you're at all concerned about what setup its doing, the code is eminently readable and a few seconds of perusal would direct you to the bootstrapping scripts (https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/tree/master/boots...)

Running letsencrypt-auto is no different than running one of the curl | sh installers; they serve the same purpose. Getting you up and running under the assumption that you may be missing bits and pieces.

I'm not concerned about what it is doing, I am complaining that the script works differently to what I expect.

https://github.com/diafygi/letsencrypt-nosudo

If you don't trust the official letsencrypt client, you can use this script to get your free certs. It doesn't install things or ask for sudo access or your private keys or have to be run on your server (except for one challenge response one-liner you can inspect). I wrote it specifically so people who didn't trust the letsencrypt client could still get free certs.

I used your script to sign my cert and it works great.

The best part is it doesn't need to bootstrap and try to install a bunch of dependencies that I don't want or need, unlike the official client.

Thanks a lot.

Just run it with the -d flag then. https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/ https://letsencrypt.readthedocs.org/ https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt

That's the whole point of the article -- from what I understand the standard letsencrypt installer makes changes; this script is easier to inspect & modify.

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