To get a TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt, they need to verify that you are in control of your domain. For regular domains, this can be done via HTTP, for wildcard certificates they require you to create a DNS record with a special token to verify ownership of the domain.
This means that in order to automatically obtain a TLS certificate, caddy needs to interact with the API of your domain registrar to set up this record. Since there are many different providers, this isn’t built into caddy itself and you require a version that includes the corresponding caddy-dns module. Caddy modules need to compiled into the binary, so it’s not always trivial to set up (in my case I have a systemd timer that rebuilds a local container image whenever a new version of the docker.io/caddy:builder image is available).
How did you set up you SSL certificates, are you using a self signed certificate or do you use a custom subdomain?
Caddy automatically sets up certificates for you. Since I don’t want my subdomain to appear in certificate transparency logs, I use a wildcard certificate which requires using a plugin for my DNS provider.
Thanks, that sounds good. Can you explain more how you used the plugin for the wildcard certificate?
To get a TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt, they need to verify that you are in control of your domain. For regular domains, this can be done via HTTP, for wildcard certificates they require you to create a DNS record with a special token to verify ownership of the domain.
This means that in order to automatically obtain a TLS certificate, caddy needs to interact with the API of your domain registrar to set up this record. Since there are many different providers, this isn’t built into caddy itself and you require a version that includes the corresponding caddy-dns module. Caddy modules need to compiled into the binary, so it’s not always trivial to set up (in my case I have a systemd timer that rebuilds a local container image whenever a new version of the docker.io/caddy:builder image is available).