certificates

🛡️ A private certificate authority (X.509 & SSH) & ACME server for secure automated certificate management, so you can use TLS everywhere & SSO for SSH.

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13Distinct people

23Mentions

1Explicit recommenders

9.1KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

🛡️ A private certificate authority (X.509 & SSH) & ACME server for secure automated certificate management, so you can use TLS everywhere & SSO for SSH.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I've been doing this for a while with SmallStep CA: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates It's a bit of a pain to load a cert onto every device (easier with stuff like…

gclawes used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

smallstep/cli · linked in 3 of the same discussions
cloudflare/cfssl · linked in 2 of the same discussions
hashicorp/vault · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year23 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-01-19 09:31:46 UTC to 2024-10-22 22:03:29 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	7	3	4
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	8	1	7
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	1	2
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	4	0	4

What Hacker News says

3 sources

adrienthebo·Oct 31, 2022

I've had my eye on [step](https://github.com/smallstep/certificates) and [step-ca](https://github.com/smallstep/certificates) for a hot minute; it's production quality and seems much more pleasant than the EasyRSA scripts. Haven't tested it but I'd recommend that as a place to start tinkering.

In Mkcert: Simple zero-config tool to make locally trusted development certificates

wyuenho·Feb 7, 2022Submission

Step-ca private CA and and ACME server

3 points · Open discussion

mmalone·Jan 6, 2022

I'm biased because I'm the founder of the company, but you should check out the certificate management toolchain (CA[1] and CLI[2]) we've built at smallstep. A big focus of the project is human-friendliness. It's not perfect (yet) but I think we've made some good progress. We also have a hosted option[3] with a free tier that should work for individuals, homelabs, pre-production, and even small production environments. We've started building out a management UI there, and it does map to the CLI as you've described :). [1] https://github.com/smallstep/certificates [2] https://github.com/smallstep/cli [3] https://smallstep.com/certificate-manager/

In Should you use Let's Encrypt for internal hostnames?