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.

  • Freeman
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    7 months ago

    I run easy-rsa on a linux box. Just manually generate CSR’s and sign them via SSH.

    And simply trust the CA cert in windows, linux and whatever extra places (normally firefox cert store).

    Post the crl.pem to /var/www/html/ and let NGINX use that.

    For most things public like plex or whatever i just use letsencrypt. Easy-rsa is really just for internal stuff like my NAS, VPN etc.

      • Freeman
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        17 months ago

        Copy them to the box. Sign them. Copy the cert file off the box back to the requester.