ACME with Home Assistant

Home Assistant is a free and open-source software for home automation, designed to be an Internet of Things ecosystem-independent integration platform and smart home hub for controlling smart home devices, with a focus on local control and privacy.

One of the requirements for the use of Home Assistant with ClouDNS is to have access to our HTTP API. All our Premium DNS and DDoS Protected DNS plans include access to the HTTP API and can be used to generate free SSL certificates with Cerbot for any hostname you need. Another important condition is, that your domain is delegated to our name servers and the DNS for the domain name is hosted on our side.

How to configure ACME with Home Assistant

1. Install Home Assistant from here.
2. Install the Let’s Encrypt add-on in Home Assistant. You can download the plugin from here
3. Configure the Let’s Encrypt add-on using DNS Challenge and ClouDNS as provider as shown in the image below. You can use either your auth-user id or sub-user id at ClouDNS. If you have not created an auth-user or sub-user, you can do this from here.

   

Difference between Sectigo SSL certificates and Let's Encrypt SSL certificates

 As you know, ClouDNS provides Sectigo SSL certificates. Currently, there is no difference in the security between the provided Positive SSL certificates and Let's Encrypt SSL certificates. The advantage of the Positive SSL certificates is that they are issued by Sectigo for 1 year (Let's Encrypt certificates are issued for 3 months) and the relying party warranty they have. The Let's Encrypt SSL certificates are a good option for mail servers, control panels, internal systems, and other types of administrative services, but using trusted SSL certificates is still an advantage for commercial websites.