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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

"Since it doesn't seem like your operating system has a packaged version of Certbot, you should use our certbot-auto script to get a copy:

    wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
    chmod a+x certbot-auto

"certbot-auto accepts the same flags as certbot; it installs all of its own dependencies and updates the client code automatically."

I don't know whether to be terrified or horrified.

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certbot-auto (previously known as letsencrypt-auto) is definitely a hack -- it allows people to run the client on typically older OSes that don't have backported native packages. It's basically a tiny autoupdate and packaging system written in bash and python. It uses airgapped signatures for updates, checks sha256 hashes for all of the python dependencies it's installing, and puts them into a python virtual environment so that they don't affect your OS.

If you don't like wget; chmod, you can check a gpg signature too: https://certbot.eff.org/docs/intro.html#installation

Oh, and it's in use on 500K - 1 million webservers. So extra eyes auditing it are always welcome :)

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