dehydrated

Install and configure dehydrated. Create user for privilege dropping and cron configuration for certificate renewals.

dehydrated is working with your private keys so be careful and review the code of this ansible role an the used dehydrated script.

For an example setup with nginx as https proxy take a look at ansible role martin-v/ansible-nginx_https_only

Requirements

The role installs on host:

• openssl
• curl
• sed
• grep
• mktemp
• git

This role need a webserver who serves the directory configured in dehydrated_challengesdir (default: /var/www/dehydrated/) at location http://<your-domain>/.well-known/acme-challenge/ for all certificate request domains.

Role Variables

Required Variables:

dehydrated_contactemail

Address for the letsencrypt account. Mostly for certificate expiration notices, but should be not happen if the cron job works fine.

dehydrated_contactemail: certmaster@example.com

dehydrated_letsencrypt_agreed_terms

To accept the letsencrypt terms of service set the variable dehydrated_letsencrypt_agreed_terms to the current license url. You find the actual url at https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/terms.

dehydrated_letsencrypt_agreed_terms: https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.2-November-15-2017.pdf

dehydrated_domains

List of domains for certificate requests. For each line a certificate will be created, in folder /etc/dehydrated/certs/ with the name of the first domain in line. The first domain is the common name, the other in line will be alternate names for the certificate.

dehydrated_domains: |
  example.com
  example.org www.example.org blog.example.org

dehydrated_deploy_cert

The Certificates must be readable for services like apache or dovecot. But only the specific services should be allowed to read the certificate for this service. So we must change the owner/group to a specific value for each certificate. For security reasons this can be only done by root user.

To have a generic solution the variable dehydrated_deploy_cert exists. This variable must contain bash script for certificate deployments. Typical tasks on deployment are copy certificate to other directories, change file owner/permissions and restart services.

This code is called similar as normal dehydrated hooks, but after the complete dehydrated run and with root permissions. The code is called once for each certificate that has been produced.

Parameters:

• DOMAIN The primary domain name, i.e. the certificate common name (CN).
• KEYFILE (Filename: privkey.pem) The path of the file containing the private key.
• CERTFILE (Filename: cert.pem) The path of the file containing the signed certificate.
• FULLCHAINFILE (Filename: fullchain.pem) The path of the file containing the full certificate chain.
• CHAINFILE (Filename: chain.pem) The path of the file containing the intermediate certificate(s).
• TIMESTAMP (Filename: chain.pem) Timestamp when the specified certificate was created.

Example:

dehydrated_deploy_cert: |
  mkdir -p /etc/nginx/ssl/${DOMAIN}
  cp "${KEYFILE}" "${CERTFILE}" "${FULLCHAINFILE}" "${CHAINFILE}" /etc/nginx/ssl/${DOMAIN}
  chown root:root /etc/nginx/ssl/${DOMAIN}/*
  chmod 600 /etc/nginx/ssl/${DOMAIN}/*
  systemctl restart nginx.service

dehydrated_run_cron_on_every_ansible_run

This role trigger on each execution the cron script to create or update the certificates. To disabled this behavior use:

dehydrated_run_cron_on_every_ansible_run: false

Optional Variables:

dehydrated_challengesdir

Directory for acme-challenge files. Your webserver should make this directory public on location http://<your-domain>/.well-known/acme-challenge/ for all domains listed before. This directory will be created if it not exist. It should be only writable for dehydrated user and readable by your webserver, this will be enforced by this role.

dehydrated_challengesdir: /var/www/dehydrated/

More variables

There are also some unusual variables for super user who need more control, for details take look at defaults/main.yml

Dependencies

None.

Example Playbook

- hosts: all
  remote_user: root
  vars_files:
    - dehydrated_vars.yml
  roles:
    - martin-v.dehydrated

Example variables file

dehydrated_contactemail: certmaster@example.com

dehydrated_letsencrypt_agreed_terms: https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.2-November-15-2017.pdf

dehydrated_domains: |
  example.com
  example.org www.example.org blog.example.org

dehydrated_deploy_cert: |
  mkdir -p /etc/nginx/ssl/${DOMAIN}
  cp "${KEYFILE}" "${CERTFILE}" "${FULLCHAINFILE}" "${CHAINFILE}" /etc/nginx/ssl/${DOMAIN}
  chown root:root /etc/nginx/ssl/${DOMAIN}/*
  chmod 600 /etc/nginx/ssl/${DOMAIN}/*
  systemctl restart nginx.service

Tips

To create certificates on ansible deployment, you can call the regular cron script: shell: "/etc/cron.weekly/dehydrated". The folder tests contain a full running example.

For import from official letsencrypt client take a look at dehydrated import wiki page.

Open tasks

0. Use molecule for better tests

License

MIT

Author Information

This role was created in 2016 and improved in 2017 by Martin V..