Express Certbot Helper

A simple ExpressJS app that can be used with Let's Encrypt certbot to create and auto-renew certificates.

Getting Started

To get started, clone the repository and install all dependencies with

git clone https://github.com/Topl/expressCertBotHelper.git
cd expressCertBotHelper
npm install

Prerequisites

By default, non-root users are not allowed to bind to ports below 1024 but certbot will present its challenge via a standard HTTP request at port 80. Therefore, you must give NodeJS specific permission to bind to the port by running

sudo apt-get install libcap2-bin
sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep `readlink -f \`which node\``

Lastly, npm module node-config is used to read the challenge and response information from certbot. You must provide a file in config/default.json with

{
  "challenge": <CHALLENGE_STRING>,
  "response": <RESPONSE_STRING>
}

The challenge string is the URL resource that certbot is going to query and the response is the data that must be provided back.

Installing

First, be sure to run the above authorization for NodeJS and supply a sample configuration file in config/

{
  "challenge": "url-string",
  "response": "It Works!!!"
}

with the configuration file in place, begin the server using

npm run start

then visit http://localhost/.well-known/acme-challenge/url-string in your browser and you should see the string "It Works!!!" displayed.

Running the tests

Currently there are no tests implemented

Built With

• ExpressJs - The web framework used
• NPM - Dependency Management

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

Authors

• James Aman - Initial work - scasplte2

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgments

• This app is based on the tutorial at https://itnext.io/node-express-letsencrypt-generate-a-free-ssl-certificate-and-run-an-https-server-in-5-minutes-a730fbe528ca