manuale 1.1.0

A fully manual Let's Encrypt/ACME client

manuale is a fully manual Let’s Encrypt/ACME client for advanced users. It is intended to be used by a human in a manual workflow and contains no automation features whatsoever.

Why?

Isn’t the point of Let’s Encrypt to be automatic and seamless? Maybe, but here’s some reasons:

• You’re not comfortable with an automatic process handling something as critical, or your complex infrastructure doesn’t allow it in the first place.

• You already have perfect configuration management with something like Ansible. Renewing is a matter of dropping in a new certificate. With a manual client that works, it’s literally a minute of work.

• You want the traditional and authentic SSL installation experience of copying files you don’t understand to your server, searching for configuration instructions and praying that it works.

Features

• Simple interface with no hoops to jump through. Keys and certificate signing requests are automatically generated: no more cryptic OpenSSL one-liners. (However, you do need to know what to do with generated certificates and keys yourself!)

• Support for DNS & HTTP validation. No need to figure out how to serve challenge files from a live domain.

• Obviously, runs without root access. Use it from any machine you want, it doesn’t care. Internet connection recommended.

• Awful, undiscoverable name.

• And finally, if the openssl binary is your spirit animal after all, you can still bring your own keys and/or CSR’s. Everybody wins.

Installation

Python 3.3 or above is required.

Using your package manager

• Arch Linux: in the AUR.

• Fedora Linux: dnf install manuale.

• Gentoo Linux.

• Package maintainers wanted: your package here?

Using Docker

There is a Docker image on the Docker Hub.

Using pip

You can install the package from PyPI using the pip tool. To do so, run pip3 install manuale.

If you’re not using Windows or OS X pip may need to compile some of the dependencies. In this case, you need a compiler and development headers for Python, OpenSSL and libffi installed.

On Debian-based distributions, these will typically be gcc python3-dev libssl-dev libffi-dev, and on RPM-based distributions gcc python3-devel openssl-devel libffi-devel.

From the git repository

git clone https://github.com/veeti/manuale ~/.manuale
cd ~/.manuale
python3 -m venv env
env/bin/python setup.py install
ln -s env/bin/manuale ~/.bin/

(Assuming you have a ~/.bin/ directory in your $PATH).

Quick start

Register an account (once):

$ manuale register [e-mail]

Authorize one or more domains:

$ manuale authorize example.com
DNS verification required. Make sure these records are in place:
  _acme-challenge.example.com. IN TXT "(some random gibberish)"
Press enter to continue.
...
1 domain(s) authorized. Let's Encrypt!

Get your certificate:

$ manuale issue --output certs/ example.com
...
Certificate issued.

Expires: 2016-06-01
 SHA256: (more random gibberish)

Wrote key to certs/example.com.pem
Wrote certificate to certs/example.com.crt
Wrote certificate with intermediate to certs/example.com.chain.crt
Wrote intermediate certificate to certs/example.com.intermediate.crt

Set yourself a reminder for renewal!

Usage

You need to create an account once. To do so, call manuale register [email]. This will create a new account key for you. Follow the registration instructions.

Once that’s done, you’ll have your account saved in account.json in the current directory. You’ll need this to do anything useful. Oh, and it contains your private key, so keep it safe and secure.

manuale expects the account file to be in your working directory by default, so you’ll probably want to make a specific directory to do all your certificate stuff in. Likewise, created certificates get saved in the current path by default.

Next up, verify the domains you want a certificate for with manuale authorize [domain]. This will show you the DNS records you need to create and wait for you to do it. For example, you might do it for example.com and www.example.com.

Once that’s done, you can finally get down to business. Run manuale issue example.com www.example.com to get your certificate. It’ll save the key, certificate and certificate with intermediate to the working directory.

There’s plenty of documentation inside each command. Run manuale -h for a list of commands and manuale [command] -h for details.

See also

• Best practices for server configuration

• Configuration generator for common servers

• Test your server

• Other clients

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright © 2016-2017 Veeti Paananen

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.