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.

  • notfromhereEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    My experience is it’s really a lot of work and with the prevalence of letsencrypt, there is not a lot of automated setups for this use case (at least that I have been able to find). It is kind of a pain in the ass to run your own CA, especially if you plan to not use wildcard and to rotate certs often. If you use tailscale, they offer https certs with a subdomain given to you:

    [server-name].[tailnet-name].ts.net

    That’s honestly what I’m moving towards.

    • ____@infosec.pubEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      From where I sit, not a lot of reason to do it. It’s a bigger pain to deal with your own CA than to just use LE.

    • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I realise that it is more work than using Let’s Encrypt, but this is a personal choice I’m making to not use a public domain for my internal network. I also do not like the idea of tailscale having access to my domain names, but then again, I’m likely not going to use Tailscale at all.

      • notfromhereEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        No judgement here. I think it’s a worthy goal just not one I am particularly interested in at this point. Maybe if the automation was a bit easier and the mobile device management was easier I might join you.