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.

  • @britishteadrinkerEnglish
    15•7 months ago

    I’d just buy a single domain, it’s like £5 a year and use a letsencrypt wildcard and have it auto renew via DNS challenges. Very easy. You can do what you’re doing with letsencrypt, but you’ll have to set up HTTP challenges for each sub domain, or DNS challenges for each sub domain. Obviously doable, but more work.

    Doing it without letsencrypt and just doing it privately? I dunno if I’d bother with that, firstly you’ll have to go through the hassle of making sure any browser and computer that connects to it has the root cert of the private CA, or you’ll get self signed errors, which is a faff. I’d honestly just pay the £5 or so a year, you’ll spend more time (and time is ultimately money) doing it without it.

    • LifeBandit666English
      2•7 months ago

      As someone who has done both I couldn’t agree more.

      I run Home Assistant and could just pay their subscription to get external access, which also supports development. But I’m a cheap Yorkshireman so I went with DuckDNS, Let’s Encrypt, Nginx and all that jazz for a long time. I’m just trying to hook my home up to Google so I can talk to it, I don’t wanna pay money!

      I had so many bloody glitches! I’d have to sign things in on a weekly basis, Google lost access all the damn time and it was just a nuisance.

      I have a rule for hobbies, I do it cheap for at least a few months to see if I lose interest. If I get a bit obsessive, it’s worth spending money on the hobby.

      So after a year or two of fucking around with Nginx and DuckDNS I found the cloudflare plugin, which worked for free for a while. It was night and day, everything remained connected!

      It ultimately bugged out one day and I decided to just bite the bullet and buy a domain. It’s a hobby I’ve invested enough time in that a few quid for a solution that just works is worth it.

      I think I dropped £35 for 5 years (I forget, it might be a decade) of owning my own .com domain name, which cloudflare manages for me.

      I now have to reconnect my Google home to my home assistant once every couple of months instead of every week.

      I haven’t missed the money, and I certainly haven’t missed the fucking tinkering to get it to work.

    • @MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1•7 months ago

      Thanks, I recognise the challenge in getting this working rather that simple relying on Let’s Encrypt. A little bit of money is not the problem here though; I have made a personal choice to use a private, reserved domain for my internal network and simply do not want to use a public domain for it.

      • @britishteadrinkerEnglish
        2•7 months ago

        You don’t have to make the public domain, well, public. You can not hook up any DNS records for it, so externally it won’t resolve anywhere and just use internal DNS.

        • @MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1•7 months ago

          Of course. I just want to take the learning experience from it as well has using a reserved domain instead of a public domain I’d purchase