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It wasn't intended to be FUD. The letsencrypt client needs to change the configuration of other services. This is a fact. Not everyone is happy about that, so I pointed out an alternative.

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".

The official letsencrypt client never touched any of my config files, it doesn't have to if you prefer to do it yourself.

> The letsencrypt client needs to change the configuration of other services. This is a fact. Not everyone is happy about that, so I pointed out an alternative.

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)

> Stop spreading FUD: it does not "mess with all sorts of configuration".

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.

As said by others if you run it with certonly it doesn't touch the config at all. My cronjob contains a

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 don't think its fud. Calling apt-get is just crazy on my view.