After the Porkbun DNS plugin for Nginx Proxy Manager stopped working, my homelab Let’s Encrypt certificates no longer renewed automatically, so I now download certificate bundles directly from Porkbun and install them manually. Along the way there’s background on SSL, DNS challenges, and securing internal services that aren’t reachable from the public internet. The manual approach requires repeating the renewal process every 90 days...
A BusyBox container serving a static site can’t fetch content over HTTPS because BusyBox ships without root CA certificates and has no package manager to install them. Rather than switch to a larger Alpine image, I settle on bind-mounting the host’s certificate directory into the container read-only, with example configurations for both docker-compose and docker run...
A walkthrough of how I add a new domain as a virtual host to an NGINX server already managed by Certbot, showing that rerunning certbot –nginx lets me expand the existing combined certificate to cover the new domain. I also cover migrating domains with existing Porkbun-issued certificates to the same server and folding them into the combined certificate, ending with a note on revoking the now-redundant ones...
I explain why I switched from manually downloading SSL certificates from PorkBun every 90 days to using Let’s Encrypt and Certbot, prompted in part by limitations with managing Australian .au domains. It covers installing Certbot on Ubuntu with NGINX, how it reads site configs to obtain and install certificates, and the systemd timer that renews them automatically...
A short walkthrough of manually renewing SSL certificates before expiry: downloading the new certificates from PorkBun, concatenating the cert and intermediate files into a fullchain with a newline between them (avoiding an issue from the previous renewal), and restarting the nginx Docker container to pick them up. Uptime Kuma and ntfy notifications confirmed the swap, leaving 84 days until the next renewal — which I still intend to automate...
I set up SSL for a domain served by Nginx in Docker, using Let’s Encrypt certificates generated through Porkbun. I cover concatenating the certificate files, fixing a malformed PEM that broke Nginx startup, and migrating from a plain docker run command to a docker-compose setup with volume mounts and SSL config. I note that certificates expire after 90 days, with certbot suggested as a future automation fix...
