Valid as of September 2020
note: if you have shell access and want to automatically renew, follow the steps on this page instead
Much of the current documentation on this from LetsEncryt and Godaddy suggests that this is a very hard thing to do - but I'm okay with spending 10 minutes every 2-3 months for a free, quality SSL certificate. If you are too, here's how I do it.
Here's my certbot command (replace mydomain.com and *.mydomain.com with your own):
certbot certonly --manual -d mydomain.com -d *.mydomain.com --preferred-challenges dns-01 --server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
From the GoDaddy Admin site, navigate to your site's DNS management screen:
- Domain Manager (or
Domains) - mysite.com > [...] > Manage DNS
- Add
Host will be _acme-challenge (ie: the text record name WITHOUT the domain name part) and TXT Value will be
whatever your certbot command prompted. This will have to be done twice if you're using a wildcard like me, since
that counts as two domains. TTL can be very short since it's only a one-time thing.
Within Godaddy site, navigatate to CPanel SSL/TLS screen:
- My Hosting (alias
Hosting & Wordpress, ...and others) - [Site Name] > [...] > Settings
- File Manager
- CPanel Home
- SSL/TLS
- Click
Manage SSL sites.
Certificate: (CRT) will be the first section of fullchain.pem that certbot generated, including the BEGIN and
END lines.
Private Key (KEY) will be the entire file named privkey.pem that certbot generated.
Certificate Authority Bundle: (CABUNDLE) will be the second section of fullchain.pem that certbot generated,
including the BEGIN and END lines.
Click Install Certificate and you're done!
This worked flawlessly. Thank you so much for making this guide.