Show HN: ACME Hugger – Make Nginx have native ACME capabilities

[hgl]

Hi, this is Glen. I find setting up Nginx with an ACME tool very involved and painful. Inspired by Caddy's automatic HTTPS, I created something similar for Nginx. It mainly addresses the followings:

1. Nginx cannot have HTTPS configuration before the certificates are obtained. So you need to edit the configuration at least once, and also manually reload it after that.

2. Nginx and the ACME tool needs to agree on the location to read and write ACME challenge answers. It can be error-prone.

3. Cron jobs have be set up to periodically renew the certificates and Nginx needs to be reloaded after that.

4. With the above drawbacks, provisioning an HTTPS web server in an automatic way is quite challenging.

With ACME Hugger, you sprinkle the Nginx configuration with a few ACME directives, and it will process the configuration, talk to an ACME server and run Nginx with a derived configuration, to handle all of the above automatically.

I hope others can find it useful too. Feedbacks are welcomed.