Easy, quick and free valid SSL certificates for your HomeLab (or other local web servers) using DuckDNS and ACME DNS-01

This video and the accompanying article explain how to set up easy SSL certificates in a HomeLab environment using DNS-01 validation.  This method should also work for other types of locally-hosted services (in other words, servers on your local network that have a web interface, but that aren’t exposed to the Internet).  The problem is that obtaining SSL certificates for internal HomeLab services can be challenging, especially when you don’t have a public IP or don’t want to expose your services to the internet.  The video and article demonstrate how to use DNS-01 validation to obtain SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt using your internal DNS server. This approach eliminates the need for a public IP or exposing services to the internet.

Article: Easy, quick and free valid SSL certificates for your homelab using DuckDNS and ACME DNS-01 (Wolfgang’s Blog)

Getting started with Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates on Ubuntu

This tutorial will guide you through your very first configuration of an SSL website with Let’s Encrypt certification. Let’s Encrypt is a new SSL authority that provides free SSL certificates. We are going to use two existing tutorials (“How to setup an intermediate compatible SSL website with Let’s Encrypt certificate” and “The Perfect Server – Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) with Apache, PHP, MySQL, PureFTPD, BIND, Postfix, Dovecot and ISPConfig 3”).

The setup described here is compatible with any Ubuntu LAMP server, so you can use this one as the basis setup too.

This tutorial will show you how to setup Let’s Encrypt on Servers without ISPConfig 3 as there will be a direct implementation of the Let’s Encrypt service in the next ISPConfig 3 release (version 3.1) soon. So if you plan to use ISPConfig, wait for the 3.1 release and also a new tutorial.

Source: Getting started with Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates on Ubuntu (Howtoforge)