There is a spiritual successor maintained by Jonas Alfredsson that has some nice new features and is much more actively maintained. I highly suggest all users migrate their docker configs to use that docker image, as it is strictly superior to this one while still maintaning the same ease of use.

Create and automatically renew website SSL certificates using the free letsencrypt certificate authority, and its client certbot, built on top of the nginx webserver.

This repository was originally forked from @henridwyer, many thanks to him for the good idea. It has since been completely rewritten, and bears almost no resemblance to the original. This repository is much more opinionated about the structure of your webservers/containers, however it is easier to use as long as all of your webservers follow the given pattern.

Create a config directory for your custom configs:

$ mkdir conf.d

And a *.conf file in that directory (i.e. nginx.conf, but NOT just .conf):

server {
    listen              443 ssl;
    server_name         server.company.com;
    ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/server.company.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/server.company.com/privkey.pem;

    location / {
        ...
    }
}

Wrap this all up with a docker-compose.yml file:

version: '3'
services:
    frontend:
        restart: unless-stopped
        image: staticfloat/nginx-certbot
        ports:
            - 80:80/tcp
            - 443:443/tcp
        environment:
            CERTBOT_EMAIL: owner@company.com
        volumes:
          - ./conf.d:/etc/nginx/user.conf.d:ro
          - letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt
volumes:
    letsencrypt:

Launch that docker-compose file, and you're good to go; certbot will automatically request an SSL certificate for any nginx sites that look for SSL certificates in /etc/letsencrypt/live, and will automatically renew them over time.

Note: using a server block that listens on port 80 may cause issues with renewal. This container will already handle forwarding to port 443, so they are unnecessary.

You may wish to template your configurations, e.g. passing in a hostname so as to be able to run multiple identical copies of this container; one per website. The docker container will use envsubst to template all mounted user configs with a user-provided list of environment variables. Example:

# In user.conf.d/nginx_template.conf
server {
    listen              443 ssl;
    server_name         ${FQDN};
    ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/${FQDN}/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/${FQDN}/privkey.pem;

    ...
}

version: '3'
services:
    frontend:
        restart: unless-stopped
        image: staticfloat/nginx-certbot
        ports:
            - 80:80/tcp
            - 443:443/tcp
        environment:
            CERTBOT_EMAIL: owner@company.com
            # variable names are space-separated
            ENVSUBST_VARS: FQDN
            FQDN: server.company.com
        volumes:
          - ./conf.d:/etc/nginx/user.conf.d:ro
          - letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt
volumes:
    letsencrypt:

• Officially putting this repository into maintenance-only mode.

• Upgraded to Python 3 installed within the environment, various quality of life improvements around initial setup and renewal.

• Many improvements thanks to contributors from across the globe. Together, we have drastically reduced the amount of customization needed; configs can be mounted directly into a prebuilt image, and the configurations can even be templated.

• Ditch cron, it never liked me anway. Just use sleep and a while loop instead.

• Complete rewrite, build this image on top of the nginx image, and run cron/certbot alongside nginx so that we can have nginx configs dynamically enabled as we get SSL certificates.

• Add nginx_auto_enable.sh script to /etc/letsencrypt/ so that users can bring nginx up before SSL certs are actually available.

• Change the name to docker-certbot-cron, update documentation, strip out even more stuff I don't care about.

• Rip out a bunch of stuff because @staticfloat is a monster, and likes to do things his way

• Add support for webroot mode.
• Run certbot once with all domains.

• Upgraded to use certbot client
• Changed image to use alpine linux

• Initial release