Confused about account registration process

I'm using acme-python to create certs within python. Documentation on this is sparse, and in the examples I've found, the client account is registered at the time of certificate creation.

From what I can tell, there is no way to "authenticate" with an existing registration using acme-python (you can only create new registrations).

Am I expected to create a new registration for each cert? If not, how do I retrieve an existing registration using the client library?

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Hi @bendavis78

that's bad, very bad.

I use two accounts, one of the test-, one of the productive system. Since 2018 (first Letsencrypt certificate).

There is no need to create so much accounts.

If that library is so limited, use another library.

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What library/client are you actually using? You're linking to the certbot Github repository..

Could you please explain a little bit more about your setup?

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Sorry, I meant the acme-python library, found here: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/tree/master/acme

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Documentation can be found here I guess: https://acme-python.readthedocs.io/

Not sure if it helps you very much, as it's quite sparse also.

In any case: I think acme-python is more of a low-level ACME client an your Python program which is using it should store the account information for usage by acme-python somewhere by itself.

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  1. You are using Certbot's acme, which is registered to PyPi as acme. It is in Python, but acme-python is a completely different package.

  2. In that library, you create a Client with an AccountKey , and all operations for that client authenticate. You can look at Certbot to see how they leverage this. for example, https://acme-python.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api/client.html#acme.client.Client.query_registration

The ACME spec is a little weird. The "newAccount" endpoint is used for both creating new accounts and authenticating/checking existing accounts.

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@jvanasco Ah, I think I posted the wrong link. After looking, I am in fact using acm-python.

Looking at the docs, I still don't see a way to get or construct a regr object given the account key.

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If I Google for "acme-python", I only get documentation on readthedocs for the "acme" package from Let's Encrypt? If "acme-python" is not the same as the acme package from the certbot Github repository, then what is it?

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@jvanasco after further investigation acme and python-acme appear to be the same thing. There is no python-acme in PyPi, but the docs here link back to the certbot repo.

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