looking for a way to get certbot running on Amazon Linux 2

Question

Amazon has a new Linux out called "Amazon Linux 2"

When I try and get certbot going....

 wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
 chmod a+x certbot-auto
 ./certbot-auto

gives this error

Sorry, I don't know how to bootstrap Certbot on your operating system!

You will need to install OS dependencies, configure virtualenv, and run pip install manually.
Please see https://letsencrypt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/contributing.html#prerequisites for more info.

Then I tried:

yum install pip
yum install python-pip
pip install cryptography 
pip install certbot
yum install python-urllib3
yum install augeas
/usr/bin/certbot

And I get this message

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/certbot", line 7, in <module>
    from certbot.main import main
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/certbot/main.py", line 19, in <module>
    from certbot import client
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/certbot/client.py", line 11, in <module>
    from acme import client as acme_client
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/acme/client.py", line 34, in <module>
    import urllib3.contrib.pyopenssl  # pylint: disable=import-error
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/urllib3/contrib/pyopenssl.py", line 50, in <module>
    from ndg.httpsclient.ssl_peer_verification import SUBJ_ALT_NAME_SUPPORT
ImportError: No module named ndg.httpsclient.ssl_peer_verification

I am not sure where to go from here. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Solution 1

I was having trouble with this as well since Amazon Linux 2 doesn't have epel-release in its repositories, but I've found you can install the EPEL RPM package itself, and then you'll be able to install certbot or certbot-nginx from there.

• Download the RPM

  curl -O http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
  

• Then install it

  sudo yum install epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
  

• Now you can install certbot

  sudo yum install certbot
  

• And then run it as usual

  sudo certbot
  

Check out the certbot page for configuration details after that.

Solution 2

Instead of Certbot you can use Acme, which works and is well documented. I have a tutorial on setting up Let's Encrypt on Amazon Linux here.

Nginx Configuration

Let's Encrypt needs to call out to the server to verify the request before a certificate is issued. Acmetool can use its built in web server or an external web server. Here's my Nginx configuration, which sits alongside a secure server block that serves the rest of the site.

# This server directly serves ACME / certificate redirects. All other requests are forwarded the https version of the page
server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main;

  # Let's Encrypt certificates with Acmetool
    location /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
    alias /var/www/.well-known/acme-challenge/;
  }

  location / {
    return 301 https://www.photographerstechsupport.com$request_uri;
  }
}

Nginx Folders

mkdir -p /var/www/.well-known/acme-challenge
chmod -R user:www-data /var/www/acme-challenge/*
find /var/www/acme-challenge/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
vi /var/www/acme-challenge/.well-known/acme-challenge/text.html   (add "hello world" or similar)

Install Acme

sudo -i   (this is run as root)
cd /opt
wget https://github.com/hlandau/acme/releases/download/v0.0.62/acmetool-v0.0.62-linux_386.tar.gz (NB check for newer versions here)
tar -xzf acmetool-v0.0.62-linux_386.tar.gz
cd acmetool-v0.0.62-linux_386/bin
cp ./acmetool /usr/local/bin
/usr/local/bin/acmetool quickstart

In the quickstart enter this as your webroot

/var/www/.well-known/acme-challenge/

Request a Certificate

/usr/local/bin/acmetool want example.com www.example.com

Troubleshooting #1

acmetool --xlog.severity=debug > /tmp/dump 2>&1 want example.com www.example.com
fgrep -v fdb: /tmp/dump | fgrep -v storageops: > /tmp/dumpout

I have other troubleshooting tips on my blog article.

Comments

[iewebguy]

This works on Amazon Linux 2 - Thanks. It looks like it will take months to verify that it is going to keep working, since there is no --force in acmetool

[Tim]

You can delete the certificates and have them generated again. I always take a backup before I do anything with certificates, because I don't do this very often I find them a bit complex.

[Dan Manastireanu]

Amazon now has instructions (mostly the same as this) on how to setup epel repositories and install certbot: docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/…