Setup guides

Pick the device that's always on at home. Each guide has the exact settings to type and a way to check it worked.

Make a free account and your own name and update key are filled into every guide.Get a free name

certbot

Below, yourname.honkip.com and YOUR_UPDATE_KEY stand for your own name and update key.

Get a free HTTPS certificate from Let's Encrypt for yourname.honkip.com and everything under it, like cameras.yourname.honkip.com. You can get it even if your internet provider blocks incoming web traffic, because the check goes through HonkIP. Reaching the server from outside is separate: your router still needs to let that traffic in.

1. On the machine with certbot, paste this once. It saves two small helper scripts:

cat > /etc/letsencrypt/honkip-auth.sh <<'EOF' #!/bin/sh curl -fsS "https://update.honkip.com/update?key=YOUR_UPDATE_KEY&hostname=$CERTBOT_DOMAIN&txt=$CERTBOT_VALIDATION" >/dev/null sleep 30 EOF cat > /etc/letsencrypt/honkip-cleanup.sh <<'EOF' #!/bin/sh curl -fsS "https://update.honkip.com/update?key=YOUR_UPDATE_KEY&hostname=$CERTBOT_DOMAIN&txt=$CERTBOT_VALIDATION&clear=true" >/dev/null EOF chmod 700 /etc/letsencrypt/honkip-*.sh

$CERTBOT_DOMAIN and $CERTBOT_VALIDATION are filled in by certbot. Don't replace them.

2. Ask for the certificate:

certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges dns --manual-auth-hook /etc/letsencrypt/honkip-auth.sh --manual-cleanup-hook /etc/letsencrypt/honkip-cleanup.sh -d yourname.honkip.com -d '*.yourname.honkip.com'

certbot renews it by itself before it runs out, using the same scripts. Your update key is inside the scripts, so keep them private.

Check it worked

The command ends with Congratulations (certbot) or Cert success (acme.sh) and shows where the certificate was saved.