Why is the "let's get started page" so vague

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1

iv been on the let's encrypt domain a couple times now. First time, I thought this is just a spam site, no really info about how to get startedm I keep getting google results about let's encrypt. The let's get started page, feels more like it wants you off of the website and search for some other application or provider.

Why isn't there a proper let's get started. Once you go to the help documents, you get into this loop, without any info

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I wasn't part of the team that wrote that page so can't answer your question directly :slight_smile:

I am an active volunteer on this site and can say that most people who visit just want to know how to get a cert. The Getting Started page is focused on that question.

Many hosting sites offer certs as part of their standard packages. That wasn't true when Let's Encrypt started. Hopefully LE's efforts standardizing ACME helped that along. And offering free certs probably helped too.

If you need to obtain your own cert you will need an ACME Client for that. Let's Encrypt provides the ACME Server in the ACME client/server setup. For the most common cases (say, running a website) the ACME Client is all you'll need to learn.

For other cases the other sections of the Let's Encrypt docs (here) will be helpful.

With that all said, is there something in particular you need help with to get started?

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Part of the problem is that Let's Encrypt isn't really designed to be directly used by end-users, or even directly by people administrating web sites. It's really hard to give a good generic "how to get started" that works for everyone, because everyone is coming from different places, and ideally most people wouldn't need to worry about it at all and it'd just be automatic.

I won't disagree that there are plenty of improvements that can be made to Let's Encrypt's documentation. I think the current flowchart should look something like this:

  1. Are you using shared hosting for a web server? If so, your hosting company should handle integrating with Let's Encrypt (or other CAs) automatically.
  2. Are you administrating your own web server? If so, you should configure whatever it has built-in to integrate with Let's Encrypt (or other CAs) automatically, like using Caddy's automatic provision, Apache's mod_md module, or Nginx's acme module.
  3. If you're using IIS on Windows, I don't think it has something built in (yet?) so you should use simple-acme or Certify The Web.
  4. If you're doing something else (like non-web-server applications), or need to manage the certificates separately for some reason, use a standalone client like certbot or lego.

But it's hard to give good general advice since many people may not even know which of the above buckets they're in.

And then there are the weird cases where you're on shared hosting that doesn't handle automatically getting certificates (or will only enable it for an additional fee), but allows you to run PHP scripts yourself that can install them (without an additional fee), which leads to niche clients like CertSage which shouldn't be needed in an ideal world but in reality are very helpful to those users.

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Can you please explain what you did expect from the website / getting started page?

I hear you say a lot of "it's not good enough", but I'm missing what could be better.

Of course as a long time user with an understanding of the process, it's really hard to not understand the "Getting Started" page, so I genuinly would like to know what your needs are.

Note that Let's Encrypt "only" offers an API based service, as explained in on the page itself. Would they need to explain that further? What exactly would you want to read?

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