Hi, I was looking at private CAs since I don’t want to pay for a domain to use in my homelab.

What is everyone using for their private CA? I’ve been looking at plain OpenSSL with some automation scripts but would like more ideas. Also, if you have multiple reverse-proxy instances, how do you distribute domain-specific signed certificates to them? I’m not planning to use a wildcard, and would like to rotate certificates often.

Thanks!

Edit: thank you for everyone who commented! I would like to say that I recognise the technical difficulty in getting such a setup working compared to a simple certbot setup to Let’s Encrypt, but it’s a personal choice that I have made.

  • [email protected]@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I run a private CA for client SSL.
    For traditional server SSL I just use let’s encrypt, although I already have the domain (less than $10 a year) for my public facing stuff, and just use a subdomain of that one for my homelab.

    I have a container with openssl for the private CA and generating user certs as well as renewing the let’s encrypt ones. I just use openssl without anything fancy.
    The output folder is only mounted rw in that one container
    I only ever mount the subfolders in read-only in other containers that need those certs.
    All these containers are running on the same server so I don’t even have to copy anything around, the containers don’t even need connectivity between them, it’s just mounted where needed.