Help installing noob Let's Encrypt on CetOS6 Apache2

I’m complete noob to Linux.

I would like to install Let’s Encrypt certificate for one domain out of several hosted domains on this Linux installation. CetOS 6.5 Apache 2.4
I can login to a root shell on my machine.
I’m also using a control panel to manage my site.

I found this tutorial which looks very well written but I still don’t understand it.


I know these are fundamentals but please bear with me and help me learn.

To where I write those instructions provided in the tutorial?
for instance
$ sudo yum install epel-release

this one looks different than other
wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
chmod a+x certbot-auto

How to find out what is path to my certbot?
$ ./path/to/certbot-auto –apache

How to arrange automatic renewal by adding a cron job?

Thanks for help.

The commands (minus the $ ) should be typed into the root shell of the server.

The cron is probably best done though your control panel ( if it has that option, as I assume you are more familiar with a GUI)

Some commands don’t have $ in front. Are they different?

If I copy/type this command into shell will it work?
./path/to/certbot-auto –apache

What to type into cron job?

They are the same. If it has a $ at the front though, don't type the $.

generally - but commands like "./path/to/certbot-auto" needs to be changed to the correct path

You GUI should have some questions about when to run the cron (I'd set it to run daily ), and the command to run being "certbot renew"

Hi @bostjan, these are all shell (command line) usage issues and it might be helpful to find a good tutorial that introduces you to the use of a Unix command line. I don't have a clear view on what is the best resource in this area for absolute beginners, but a lot of things may make a lot more sense when you've gone through something like that.

In this case, after you download certbot-auto with wget, it will be in the current directory that you were in when you ran the wget command. The current directory can be referred to with . so you can type ./certbot-auto --apache in this case, to refer to running certbot-auto from your current directory.

If you'd like, you can also find out the explicit name of this directory by running pwd; it might turn out to be something like /home/bostjan depending on the way the server is set up and what your account name on that server is. If that's the case, an alternative to the ./certbot-auto form would be like /home/bostjan/certbot-auto (or the home directory abbreviation form ~/certbot-auto). The latter two would work even if you have previously changed into some other directory via the cd command, while the . form would no longer work in that situation because the current directory would no longer be the one containing your copy of certbot-auto.

I hope that helps.

@serverco may be right to expect that the control panel would allow you to add one. If not, you'll need to learn to use a text editor to edit files on the server. Once you're familiar with that, you can make a file in /etc/cron.daily containing

#!/bin/sh /path/to/certbot-auto/certbot-auto renew

and mark that file executable with chmod +x. There is an alternative form involving running crontab -e, which will invoke a default text editor to edit the crontab file. However, that then requires a specific syntax indicating how often to run the job (minute hour day month dayofweek command), so the /etc/cron.daily version is probably simpler.

Thank you for the answers.

As I understand I can choose to where I can install certbot? Is that right?
On my server this domain has its own user. Some other users on this server have more domains associated.
How do I install certbot? As a root user or as a user who “controls” this domain? To where do I install cerbot to a home decretory of this user or the default directory (I don’t know where that is)?
Will I have to install certbot again for other domains?

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