Localhost lets encrypt

Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. https://crt.sh/?q=example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.

My domain is: i dont know (localhost)?

I ran this command: sudo certbot --apache

It produced this output:
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator apache, Installer apache
No names were found in your configuration files. Please enter in your domain
name(s) (comma and/or space separated) (Enter ‘c’ to cancel): https://localhost/


One or more of the entered domain names was not valid:

https://localhost/: Requested name https://localhost/ appears to be a URL, not a
FQDN. Try again without the leading “https://”.

Would you like to re-enter the names?

(Y)es/(N)o: y
Please enter in your domain name(s) (comma and/or space separated) (Enter 'c’
to cancel): localhost/
Obtaining a new certificate
An unexpected error occurred:
The request message was malformed :: Error creating new authz :: Invalid character in DNS name
Please see the logfiles in /var/log/letsencrypt for more details.

My web server is (include version):

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Apache/2.4.18

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: i dont know.

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don’t know): yes

I’m using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel):no

okay so through these questions I think i already know the answer. I cant use lets encrypt just with my localhost i need to actually have a website up and running. Am I right?

Hi @mpskierbg, yes, that's right—or at least there needs to be a public domain name that you control that you want to be the subject of the name. Let's Encrypt can't issue certificates for localhost or anything other than a public fully-qualified domain name. (If you search this forum for "localhost", you can find more discussions involving people who wanted certificates to use on their local machines for development purposes, in case that's part of your situation.)

some CAs can issue these types of certificates but they are chargeable

https://www.globalsign.com/en-au/ssl/intranetssl/

For an individual user, I don’t think that offers any clear benefit compared to using self-signed certificates.

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