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First Certificate

Once the account is ready, it is time to move on to issuing the first certificate.

tip

Use the staging account first to work out any issues or errors prior to trying this with your production account.

Create A Private Key​

This step can be skipped when intending to generate a new key. Generating a new key is an option presented when creating a new certificate.

If you want to import an existing key, navigate to Private Keys, click New Key, and import the key before proceeding.

Create A New Certificate​

Navigate to Certificates and click New Certificate. Populate the form with the desired details.

New Staging Certificate

Once submitted, you'll be redirected to the new certificate. Click the Place New Order button (at the bottom) to send a request to the ACME Server to issue a new certificate.

A new order will appear under ACME Orders. Wait for its Status to change to Valid or Invalid. While waiting, you can check the status by navigating to Order Queue or Logs.

If the Order moves to Valid, everything worked properly. If it moved to Invalid review the logs to determine the reason why. The most likely cause is an improperly configured Provider (Challenge Solver). Make changes as appropriate and click Place New Order and wait for the result. Repeat this process until the Order result is Valid.

Valid Order

Once things are working, repeat this process with the production account for all of the certificates you want. Use this same process for future certificates.

After an Order becomes Valid, Cert Warden will automatically place future orders ~40 days before expiration to keep the certificate fresh.

tip

The first production certificate you should issue should be for your Cert Warden server to secure it. If you did not edit config.yaml Cert Warden will run in https mode using the certificate name serverdefault so use that as the name of this production certificate.

Once the certificate's order is Valid, navigate to Settings and click Restart and your server will reload with https using the specified https port in the config file (port 4055 if not specified).