Edit: I understand and agree on why they made it like this. But automating it is not an option in my use case, oh well... I agree it's for the better in the grand scheme of things :).
I think they do that on purpose to get people to automate the certificate renewal. Their default client of course messes with all sorts of configuration to make auto-renew work "out of the box".
Many people (myself included) aren't fans of their client getting so much access, but there are other clients out there that don't need it. I use acme-tiny[0] in a small shell cronjob once a month. It lets acme-tiny request a renewed certificate. Then it checks that the new certificate is valid, copies it to the right places and reloads the relevant services.
Honestly, I couldn't be happier about not having to manually change certificates again.
_Renewal doesn't touch any config files at all._ "letsencrypt-auto" puts the certs/keys under /etc/letsencrypt/keys. On renewal, new files get added. Old files are never touched. /etc/letsencrypt/live contains symlinks to the most recent files. Your webserver config uses these => its config does not need to be changed for renewal.
What you're talking about is only the initial certificate installation with "letsencrypt-auto run", and it makes a very targeted change in your Apache config. Use etckeeper if you don't trust it. If you still don't want that, use "letsencrypt-auto certonly".
(Note on server restarts: It also supports multiple methods, one of which is the webroot method, with which letsencrypt-auto does the challenge by putting a file under .well-known/acme-challenge/ of your webroot and lets your webserver handle the request, so it doesn't need to restart/replace your webserver itself.)
And about all these "minimalistic tools": I've seen one that literally did "new-cert.sh > $cert-file". If it failed (e.g. due to ratelimit, no internet connectivity, ...), it would null your old cert! Written and used by very smug people.
If you're happy with the official client, by all means, use it! There's nothing inherently wrong with that approach, it's just not compatible with the way I and some others prefer to do things.
EDIT in response to your edit:
> And about all these "minimalistic tools": I've seen one that literally did "new-cert.sh > $cert-file". If it failed (e.g. due to ratelimit, no internet connectivity, ...), it would null your old cert! Written and used by very smug people.
Absolutely, the minimal tools are not for people who don't know what they're doing. You absolutely would not run acme-tiny for example with write access to your actual cert that the web server is using, because any number of failure scenarios would result in downtime. That's why I specifically addressed that in the initial post you're replying to when I said: "Then it checks that the new certificate is valid, copies it to the right places and reloads the relevant services".
No, it doesn't NEED to. It's the most commonly discussed option, but it is not necessary. It can do the exact same "write to a folder in the webroot" mode most of the alternatives use.
(I'm not saying that there is no reason to use an alternative client, but that's not it)
It does more than you'd expect, IMO.
> letsencrypt-auto is a wrapper which installs some dependencies from your OS standard package repositories (e.g. using apt-get or yum), and for other dependencies it sets up a virtualized Python environment with packages downloaded from PyPI.
http://letsencrypt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/using.html
I was certainly a bit surprised when apt-get ran.
path/to/letsencrypt-auto certonly --webroot --renew-by-default -w /var/www/letsencrypt/ -d example.com
and puts the signed certificates into /etc/letsencrypt/live/excample.com/fullchain.pem . This is followed by a service nginx reload
I did not trust their automatic configuration as well so I simply configured nginx to use the keys + cert and to serve .well-known/acme from /var/www/letsencrypt/ for all my domains.
That's all. It works quite fine and if something does not work (e.g. python breaks.) such that the renewal is unsuccessful. LE will send you an email in advance (I think 30 days) so you have plenty of time to look after it.
I'd rather run that script manually 4 times a year than go through the pain of renewing all of my certs by logging in to websites and pasting CSR's and Certs around every 1 or 2 years.
Once I'm comfortable with the process I'll just cron it and forget about it.
It's advanced setups like this where LetsEncrypt fails out of the box, but it's nice we have tools like this at our disposal now.
Since v0.4.0 all it takes is a "letsencrypt renew && apachectl graceful" in a daily cronjob (or, preferably, systemd timer), it handles the rest. Tweak as you like.
Still crossing fingers for full nginx support soon.
If you use letsencrypt with "certonly --apache" (or --nginx, when the nginx plugin is released) it will make only transient changes to your config in order to obtain the cert, and then restore it to the original state before exiting.
If you use letsencrypt with "run" (which is the default command) it will make config changes if those appear to be necessary for installing the cert.
One challenge we've had is how to design the command line interface to ensure that the users who want maximum automation get it, and the users who want maximum manual control also get that. Both set of behaviour are available.
"letsencrypt-auto renew" uses the same settings you've used with "letsencrypt-auto run/certonly". If you're using nginx, that's probably the --webroot method. Which works for renewals too.
"It is possible to hit the rate limit using letsencrypt renew and have it fail or partially fail for that reason."
https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/help-us-test-renewal-wit...
They launched with 90-day expiry but without a robust renewal process.
I'm glad your setup is so simple.
Then you're doing it wrong - there is no reason you shouldn't be able to automate it that I can envision
Then you've got those appliances that take a power cycle and 30 minute outage to install such a certificate. Five year certs are very attractive for this situation.