Leaving beta? They don't even have a Windows/IIS client yet. They're nowhere close to "release quality".
[1]: https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/wiki/Links#window...
Maybe you're right, but how would a potential user know it?
That being said, I sincerely hope that anyone responsible for TLS deployment knows how to use a search engine and enter "letsencrypt windows".
Seriously, though. Maybe I misunderstand. Wasn't the entire point of this project to make it as easy as possible to add and maintain a SSL cert for any website? If that's their mission statement, then they're really, really, really far away from that goal and I re-assert that they probably shouldn't be calling it "production-ready".
If I'm wrong, and that's not their goal, well, fair enough.
All I'm saying is I run a website based on IIS and I go to their website, there's absolutely no hint that they support Windows in any fashion whatsoever. Nor even a hint that I might be able to Google for alternative clients that do.
Now I think that's a pretty damned big flaw. Maybe I'm the only one.
EDIT: (As an aside, the documentation is part of the project, so if it's "not perfect yet", as you claim, that also supports that they're not ready to leave beta yet.)
Traditional CAs leave the actual configuration of said certificates completely up to you. Let's Encrypt, in addition to having a protocol that's based on an IETF specification, offers a client which tries to completely automate this part, as well as renewal. Right now, this only works for apache (and, experimentally, nginx) with the official client. Note that just this alone is significantly more than what you'd get from a traditional CA. In addition to that, you also have a number of third-party clients, many of which do this for IIS as well.
The stability or "feature-completeness" of the CA Let's Encrypt is completely independent from the client ecosystem. Let's Encrypt provides certificates, and those certificates work on Windows - that's pretty much it. That's why the beta label was removed.
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The answer is: I don't. I hit the "getting started" page. I see instructions for Linux. I don't have Linux. I say "oh well," and leave.
In fact that scenario is pretty much exactly what happened a few weeks ago when someone told me about let's encrypt. Which explains the post I made to this thread today.
example:
https://knowledge.rapidssl.com/support/ssl-certificate-suppo...
You're also missing my point that a documentation issue doesn't mean a service deserves the "beta" label.
How do you know that there are ACME clients for Windows? Irrelevant towards the beta status of the LE CA.
If you make the process require knowledge of acronyms like "ACME" or "LE CA", well. You've not attained that goal. You're not even close. That's the message I'm trying to get across here.
If I misunderstand the goal, then by all means, correct me.
Possible there is support for Windows and IIS, but their own website strongly suggests otherwise.
EDIT: if they consider their client and their CA as two different products, well, right now the website conflates the two badly. And there's absolutely nothing there to suggest it supports Windows/IIS.
> And there's absolutely nothing there to suggest it supports Windows/IIS.
Their "system" is an API for issuing certificates. There's nothing platform specific about that.
> right now the website conflates the two badly.
From https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/: You’re welcome to use any compatible client, but we only provide instructions for using the client that we provide.
Edit: This is the protocol they use: https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec
I found the link here: https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/
Now I'm just confused.
But I still say: if their mission is to make it as easy as possible to install a SSL cert on any website, as long as they don't have any (apparent) support for Windows/IIS, they're a long, long, long way away from fulfilling that mission and probably shouldn't be leaving beta.
I was excited to use this, kept up with the news for over a year then when it launched there were no really practical to use windows clients and after fighting with it for a while we decided it was cheaper and easier to just renew our paid cert instead of wasting time with it any longer.
I hope there is a viable automated windows client for this before we have to renew again next year but everything is pointing to this being more of a non-windows thing so far.