Certbot manual with certonly

I've been using certbot for many years, running it every ~90 days to renew my domains by manually recreating the cert from the command-line for about 40 different domains because very few of them actually have websites and document roots associated with them. Instead, they are a combination of mail and webservers.

The actual command I run is:

certbot -d ... --manual --preferred-challenges dns certonly

This requires me to update the _acme.challenge DNS record for all 40 domains plus the hosts in the domain, like smtp.domainA.com, etc.

Is there a faster way?

I'm not sure what other information I can provide to help here.

There has been a huge time since I used Certbot, but had a similar issue.

There are some plugins that you can install that can authenticate to your DNS provider (ie. Cloudflare, Route 53, etc.) and automatically create the records for you.

You can obtain more information in the following link:

https://eff-certbot.readthedocs.io/en/stable/using.html#dns-plugins

Hope it helps!

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Sadly, my DNS provider (cloudns.net) isn't on there.

You're not using certbot? Is there something else I should be using instead?

Your DNS host is probably the biggest one--a number of DNS hosts have APIs that allow automated updates to the records, and certbot has plugins to deal with many of them. If certbot doesn't, acme.sh supports over 150 DNS hosts and may work better.

Failing that, consider something like acme-dns.

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See:

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Awesome. Thanks so much for your help.

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