bug#26685: certbot service experience

[Chris Marusich]

Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> writes:

>  - I was surprised that I was prompted for an email while doing guix
>    system reconfigure

That does seem odd.  Why were you prompted for an email address?  Can
that be fixed somehow?

>   2) Enable the certbot-service-type (and mcron-service-type if you
>      haven't already):
>
>        (service certbot-service-type
>                 (certbot-configuration
>                  ;; Replace these with your own domain and web root
>                  (hosts '("test.activitypub.rocks"))
>                  (webroot "/srv/activitypub.rocks/site/")))
>        ;; if you don't have an mcron service already
>        (service mcron-service-type)

Where is the certbot-service-type defined?  I couldn't find it in the
master branch.  Also, why is mcron required?  I don't know much about
LetsEncrypt, but I thought certbot was a one-time thing that you do
manually...  Why is it a "service" here?

>   3) Okay hopefully that went successfully!  It should say.  Assuming it
>      did, *now* we can add the keys appropriately to the nginx config.
>
>        (service nginx-service-type
>                 (nginx-configuration
>                  (server-blocks
>                   (list
>                    (nginx-server-configuration
>                     ;; Again, adjust to your site
>                     (server-name '("test.activitypub.rocks"))
>                     (root "/srv/activitypub.rocks/site/")
>                     (ssl-certificate
>                      
> "/etc/letsencrypt/live/test.activitypub.rocks/fullchain.pem")
>                     (ssl-certificate-key
>                      
> "/etc/letsencrypt/live/test.activitypub.rocks/privkey.pem"))))))
>
>      Reconfigure and cross your fingers!
>
>   4) At this point I was surprised that it seemed like nginx should have
>      been working with https since everything was in place, but I
>      couldn't access it from my browser over https.  Frustrated, I
>      restarted the server.
>
>      And then it worked! :)
>
> So, this involved reconfiguring, reconfiguring, reconfiguring, and then
> a restart, then it worked for me.  (Well, plus a few reconfigures where
> nothing worked at all because I broke things of course. ;))  I wonder if
> that can be improved?

I wonder if it is possible to define a custom service which orchestrates
the execution of nginx and certbot in the way you require, so that you
can define it all in one place, at once, without needing to reconfigure
multiple times?

> That said, it's still really exciting to be able to describe these
> things declaratively, and to have Guix take care of keeping things
> renewed for me. :)  Excited to have this landing, and to be that much
> closer to doing server deployment with GuixSD!

Pretty cool!  Thanks for sharing your experience.  It's always neat to
read about how people are using the system.

-- 
Chris

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