Obtaining Let's Encrypt certificate using Cloudflare
Introduction
HTTPS is the current standard for secure access to webpages, even in your homelab environment. However, most self-hosted applications by default use HTTP. To enable HTTPS you can use self-signed certificates, but then when accessing application, you will be prompted to trust self-signed certificate. On some devices like Android, this can be very troublesome because you need to trust self-signed certificate every time you open webpage. To solve this problem you need to add RootCA certificate to the system, which is also a troublesome process. Less troublesome solution is to use Let's Encrypt certificates. In this post, I will show you how to obtain such certificate for single host in your homelab.
UPDATE 2025-11-15: Added paragraph "Bonus - Copying certificates" at the end of article describing how to auto copy certificates to other directories.
OS used: Debian 12
Software used: certbot 2.1.0