Is it normal for two TLS certificates to be generated if I want to use a wildcard?

General
1

Well, I’ve never bought premium TLS certificates that cost an annual fee for issuing them. I always thought that if I subscribed to a premium one instead of using Let’s Encrypt, I’d get a single TLS certificate that works for the main domain and all subdomains (the wildcard).

But when using Caddy, no matter how I organize the Caddyfile, it always generates two TLS files, one for the main domain and another separate one for the wildcard.

So my questions are:

  • Do premium certificate providers also issue two TLS certificates?
  • Is this a limitation of Caddy?
  • Is this a limitation of Let’s Encrypt because it’s free?
2

Yes it is.

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3

One certificate:

*.example.com {
...
}

Two certificates:

example.com, *.example.com {
...
}

*.example.com certificate does not cover example.com, so if you want example.com site as well, you need a cert for that. Usually, external CAs issue a certificate with both example.com and *.example.com in SAN field.

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4

Ok, but do premium certifiers issue 2 or only 1?

5

Either-or. It depends on how you carve your CSR.

Caddy doesn’t do multiple SANs. It only does one SAN per cert.

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6

Does that mean it’s possible to have just one certificate for both example.com and *.example.com? And isn’t there a way to do the same with Let’s Encrypt+caddy?

7

Not with Caddy. Caddy only does one SAN per cert.

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8

And Let’s Encrypt does support double SAN, right?

9

Yes

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10

And why doesn’t Caddy want to support double SAN? Is it difficult to implement?

11

You can search this forum for that :slight_smile:

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