dehydrated/docs/wellknown.md

WELLKNOWN

With http-01-type verification (default in this script, there is also support for dns based verification) Let's Encrypt (or the ACME-protocol in general) is checking if you are in control of a domain by accessing a verification file on an URL similar to http://example.org/.well-known/acme-challenge/m4g1C-t0k3n.
It will do that for any (sub-)domain you want to sign a certificate for.

At the moment you'll need to have that location available over normal HTTP on port 80 (redirect to HTTPS will work, but starting point is always HTTP!).

dehydrated has a config variable called WELLKNOWN, which corresponds to the directory which should be served under /.well-known/acme-challenge on your domain. So in the above example the token would have been saved as $WELLKNOWN/m4g1C-t0k3n.

If you only have one docroot on your server you could easily do something like WELLKNOWN=/var/www/.well-known/acme-challenge, for anything else look at the example below.

Example Usage

If you have more than one docroot (or you are using your server as a reverse proxy / load balancer) the simple configuration mentioned above wouldn't work, but with just a few lines of webserver configuration this can be solved.

An example would be to create a directory /var/www/dehydrated and set WELLKNOWN=/var/www/dehydrated in the scripts config.

You'll need to configure aliases on your Webserver:

Nginx example config

With Nginx you'll need to add this to any of your server/VHost config blocks:

server {
  [...]
  location /.well-known/acme-challenge {
    alias /var/www/dehydrated;
  }
  [...]
}

Apache example config

With Apache just add this to your config and it should work in any VHost:

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

<Directory /var/www/dehydrated>
        Options None
        AllowOverride None

        # Apache 2.x
        <IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </IfModule>

        # Apache 2.4
        <IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
                Require all granted
        </IfModule>
</Directory>

Lighttpd example config

With Lighttpd just add this to your config and it should work in any VHost:

server.modules += ("alias")
alias.url += (
 "/.well-known/acme-challenge/" => "/var/www/dehydrated/",
)