In cPanel & WHM version 58, we introduced a new feature called AutoSSL. I posted about AutoSSL before, but in case you haven’t heard of it yet, here’s more information. AutoSSL allows you to enable a feature in your cPanel & WHM account package which triggers the automatic request and installation of Domain Validated Comodo-signed SSLs for your customers, free of charge. Security is incredibly important to us, and this is a feature we’ve been working on for a very long time.

Let’s Encrypt™

is a new-comer to the certificate authority world, and it has gained popularity very quickly. They, too, offer free Domain Validated SSL certificates, which fits perfectly with AutoSSL. While adding support for Let’s Encrypt wasn’t on our roadmap until earlier this year, it quickly became the

highest-voted request on our Feature Request site

. That kind of unprecedented community support made us very excited, and our development teams worked hard to find time for it.

The first hurdle we encountered when researching incorporating Let’s Encrypt’s support to cPanel & WHM was that our development and release cycle is completely out of sync with theirs. To accommodate that while maintaining our standards, we decided to do something we have not done in a while: develop our own plugin to provide support for a third-party application.

The BETA version of that plugin was tested by a fantastic group of beta-testers, on production servers running cPanel & WHM versions 56 and 58. I’m happy to now be able to say that the plugin is available to everyone running cPanel & WHM version 58.0.17 and above. In version 58 the installation is limited to command-line access. Once you are SSH’ed into the server as root, you can just run this command:

/scripts/install_lets_encrypt_autossl_provider

Once installed, Let’s Encrypt will appear in WHM’s Manage AutoSSL interface (Home >> SSL/TLS >> Manage AutoSSL), where you can enable the provider.

Please note that there are several domain limits and rate limits associated with the Let’s Encrypt service. For a summary of these limits, read our AutoSSL documentation at http://go.cpanel.net/autossl