Installing Certbot on Raspbian Stretch Lite for obtaining Let’s Encrypt’s browser-trusted certificates

Certbot + Raspbian logo

By offering free browser-trusted certificates, Let's Encrypt makes it easy for ordinary folks like you and me to deploy secure web applications that serve HTTPS traffic 24-7.

The issuance of Let's Encrypt certificates is automated by software participating in the ACME protocol. We will need to run such a software on devices which host web servers serving HTTPS traffic.

The Raspbian Stretch Lite operating system is a way to create performant web-based appliances with Raspberry Pis. If you need to secure your web-based applications on Raspbian Stretch Lite, you may choose to install Certbot on Raspbian Stretch Lite as a first step.

This post extends Certbot's installation instruction on Debian Stretch to provide the steps for installing Certbot on Raspbian Stretch Lite.

Enabling the Stretch backports repo

Certbot for Raspbian Stretch Lite is available via the stretch-backports. As a first step, we need to enable the stretch-backports repo before we run the command to install Certbot:

sudo sed -i "$ a\deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main" /etc/apt/sources.list

Installing Certbot

Once we had enabled the stretch-backports, we can then run the following commands to install Certbot:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install certbot -t stretch-backports -y --force-yes

About Clivant

Clivant a.k.a Chai Heng enjoys composing software and building systems to serve people. He owns techcoil.com and hopes that whatever he had written and built so far had benefited people. All views expressed belongs to him and are not representative of the company that he works/worked for.