DirectAdmin PHP API for Lets Encrypt DNS validation

This repository contains code snippets to automate your Lets Encrypt DNS validation when using DirectAdmin as DNS server. It works with certbot-auto and supports currently only WILDCARD validations.

For my Medium post about this, click here

Prerequisites

Make sure you have the following things ready:

• You have a domainname that is pointed to the DirectAdmin server
• Make sure you can run .PHP files (via the browser)
• You have cerbot-auto installed on a Linux box. Click here for an installation guide
• Download the httpsocket.php file

Setup

You can run the PHP scripts on a seperate server:

1. Copy the letsencrypt-wildcard.php and httpsocket.php file to someplace in your webroot on your HTTP server
2. Edit the settings in the letsencrypt-wildcard.php file.
3. Make sure you change the $requestValidationPassword variable!.
4. Test if it works by going to http(s)://yourdomain.com/path/to/letsencrypt-wildcard.php?pass={{MYPASS}}&certbot_domain=yourdomain.com&certbot_validation=test123 In your DirectAdmin web UI, navigate to your domain, 'Your Account' => 'DNS management'. You should see the _acme-challenge.yourdomain.com record there as a TXT record with test123 as value.

On the server where you want to create the SSL certificates:

1. Place the cleanup.sh and prehook.sh files in a folder (preferably together with cerbot-auto).
2. Edit them to make sure they point to the right location and include the right password.
3. Make them executable by doing chmod +x {filename}.sh.

Then, if all is working well, you should be able to use the following command to generate a wildcard certificate (might require su):

./certbot-auto certonly --manual --preferred-challenges=dns --manual-auth-hook ./prehook.sh --manual-cleanup-hook ./cleanup.sh -d *.example.com --non-interactive --manual-public-ip-logging-ok

This command automatically agrees with the TOS and public IP logging. If you would like to test the command without generating a real certificate, add --dry-run at the end of the command.

Automatic renewal

If you want to renew your certificates, you can run the command ./certbot-auto renew. It should renew your certs without any parameters, so you can place this easily in your crontab.

Known problems

DirectAdmin has some issues with publishing the DNS records. To test if your DNS record is working, test this from a Linux box: dig @nameserver.yourdomain.com TXT _acme-challenge.yourdomain.com.

Sometimes, the DNS gets not immediately synced by the DNS server. This means it takes some time for the records to become visible. You can edit the SLEEP command in the prehook.sh file to make sure Lets Encrypt waits a certain time before validating.