The Let’s Encrypt project

INTRODUCTION

Note: To get started quickly, use the interactive installation guide.

User Guide The Let’s Encrypt project

The word is out about Let’s Encrypt, the free and open-source SSL/TLS certificate authority managed by the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). Let’s Encrypt has just dropped their prices to $0.00! This means that everyone can protect themselves without paying anything upfront ever again. And with no cost associated whatsoever, you might ask yourself, why wouldn’t I want to use it? There are so many ways in which this product will make your life better: lower risk of phishing attacks on your domain name; increase in search engine ranking; protection form malicious software like ransomware.

You can find updated documentation here

Contributing

If you’d like to contribute to this project please read Developer Guide. This project is governed by EFF’s Public Projects Code of Conduct.

Challenges

To receive a certificate from Let’s Encrypt certificate authority (CA), you must pass a challenge to prove you control each of the domain names that will be listed in the certificate. A challenge is one of a list of specified tasks that only someone who controls the domain should be able to accomplish, such as:

Posting a specified file in a specified location on a web site (the HTTP-01 challenge) Posting a specified DNS record in the domain name system (the DNS-01 challenge) It’s possible to complete each type of challenge automatically (Certbot directly makes the necessary changes itself, or runs another program that does so), or manually (Certbot tells you to make a certain change, and you edit a configuration file of some kind in order to accomplish it). Certbot’s design favors performing challenges automatically, and this is the normal case for most users of Certbot.

The Let’s Encrypt project is a nonprofit organization that offers free SSL certificates to the internet.

The team behind this movement want all users on our global village Web securely encrypted with an https:// URL, which will prevent third parties like hackers and government agencies from reading what you’re doing online - they can’t tell who you are or where in particular your information might exist without breaking encryption!

You can find updated documentation here