The march of freely available TLS certificates for domain validation continues in the form of the Let’s Encrypt project and I’m very pleased that it does.

I’m very happy with the Certbot client on most systems where I need to deploy Let’s Encrypt, but on hosts facing the big wide world that are Windows-based, Certbot obviously is not an option!

Fortunately, I’ve had success with the ACMESharp library for PowerShell. What’s cool about the library is that it does break down the process into individual commands, meaning you can automate, script and report on your certificate status with a great deal of flexibility.

For simpler scenarios, though, the letsencrypt-win-simple client offers a nice friendly command line interface to the ACMESharp library and is a nice easy way to quickly retrieve and install a Let’s Encrypt certificate on a public-facing IIS instance. Automating the renewal process is easy too — just create a Task Scheduler task.

Yes, it’s a command line client, and there are Windows folks who may not be comfortable with that, but it walks you through every part of the process. No memorising of switches and flags are needed!

There really is no excuse — now is the perfect time to get everything on HTTPS!