NGINX Introduces Native Support for ACME Protocol

For me it was usually that the config that I need to serve a site with TLS is quite short, there are sensible defaults and many things (e.g. websockets) just work without further declaration. That's especially important if you want to host a container that has some lacking documentation about usage of reverse proxies, as most things "just work fine" for me.

And using a simple include directive, you can even replicate 'sites-available' and 'sites-enabled' behaviour. My standard Caddyfile just sets up the log file format and location and basic Let Encrypt values. Then it includes /foo/bar/sites-available/*. Every deployment/container now has its own Caddyfile that just gets linked there.

You can setup wild card certs with a DNS challenge using traefik. No plug-ins needed, works right out the box.

Personally, I quite prefer traefik. Its harder to use than Caddy but offers more features. Also, it uses yaml or docker labels for config. I'm not a fan of the nginx .conf format.

DNS-01 is in the pipeline at least, so hopefully we'll see that bring wildcard certs along with it.

It's nice to see this being integrated into nginx. I've been using ACME.sh for around a decade instead. It just triggers through a script on a crontab schedule grabbing a new cert via DNS-01 if necessary, then refreshing nginx to recognize the new file.