Products · Product
Certbot
Raised as a usability problem by 14 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2016–2026), in 14 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Docs must be reread several times to find a working scenarioUnreviewed
20162026- Certbot outputs PEM, needing conversion that often breaks and requires manual fixing2025-12-02
- Certbot makes surprising magic changes to host and server configuration, annoying experienced admins2025-08-13
- Author had to reread Certbot's docs several times to find a working scenario2021-01-19
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 16 complaints
- Automatically reconfiguring the webserver to use certificates is annoying2026-03-25
- Snap is the only supported installation channel, which is hard to work with2026-03-22
- Certbot outputs PEM, needing conversion that often breaks and requires manual fixing2025-12-02
- Automated renewals break silently after updates, forcing urgent manual debugging before certificates expire2025-12-02
- Modifies config files to remember command line options, fighting automation and manual emergency fixes2025-08-14
- Certbot makes surprising magic changes to host and server configuration, annoying experienced admins2025-08-13
- Certificate setup is annoying because the tool has terrible user experience2022-08-24
- Snap install errors waste hours and leave the user unable to run certbot2022-08-21
- Fails silently every few months with cryptic, non-actionable error messages, forcing manual SSH fixes2021-08-20
- Author had to reread Certbot's docs several times to find a working scenario2021-01-19
- Manual or non-standard setups need several custom scripts; docs ignore such use cases2020-06-29
- Existing ACME clients don't support batching DNS challenges with delayed verification2020-03-04
- Default certbot setup fails renewal after tls-sni-01 is disabled, with unclear challenge error2018-01-10
- Opting out of key rotation with certbot's --csr is very annoying to use2017-08-24
- Auto mode destroyed a site and was a huge hassle to set up and renew2016-09-20
- Aimed at laymen but requires so much detail to configure and run2016-05-13