Easy Auto Renewal with Letsencrypt

After reading a lot of different docs for letsencrypt I couldn’t find an easy way of auto renewing my domains simply. So after I’ve compiled what I’ve found so far.

Add the following to your nginx conf block block:

location  /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
  alias /var/www/mikebell.io/.well-known/acme-challenge;
  try_files $uri =404;
}

Then add the following to crontab as root:

0 0 1 * * letsencrypt certonly --webroot -w /var/www/mikebell.io/ -d mikebell.io --renew-by-default

The --renew-by-default is key here since it means that it runs without being interactive.