Long way too go... unable to install caddy custom

[hackaro]

ok, I have good news… Partially! LOL !

First I’m pretty happy because I’ve finally solved the matter of addressing correctly Dynu’s DDNS with my router. The solution has been pretty simple: I’ve adopted another container that makes the DDNS update, you can find it here.

I was able to correctly create the docker compose file and create an instance of it which is running on my NUC. Pretty happy about that!

And in fact I get:

Then I was also able to correctly open the 80 and 443 ports of my mobile router:

So Caddy should work now but, guess what? It doesn’t!

Ok, here I digress for a moment because I’d like to know if I understood correctly.
Caddy usually uses CA from Let’s Encrypt which has two services, one for staging and one for production. The one for staging is there just because it gives the chance to try your configuration and doesn’t block you if you make too many mistakes. Which is probably my case! LOL!

when I used the directive acme_dns it’s because I want to use the DNS challenge and NOT the HTTPS one. That’s because I want to use as many subdomains as I want without restrictions, as I read here:

@matt

With that, Caddy will serve all direct subdomains of example.com using a single wildcard certificate. Oh, but check your ACME CA’s policies about issuing wildcard certificates. At time of writing, some CAs like Let’s Encrypt only issue wildcard certificates using the DNS challenge.

Now in fact what I get in the logs is:

{"level":"error","ts":1741277241.923372,"logger":"tls.obtain","msg":"could not get certificate from issuer","identifier":"tilde.mywire.org","issuer":"acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org-directory","error":"HTTP 403 urn:ietf:params:acme:error:unauthorized - During secondary validation: No TXT record found at _acme-challenge.tilde.mywire.org"}
{"level":"error","ts":1741277241.923496,"logger":"tls.obtain","msg":"will retry","error":"[tilde.mywire.org] Obtain: [tilde.mywire.org] solving challenge: tilde.mywire.org: [tilde.mywire.org] authorization failed: HTTP 403 urn:ietf:params:acme:error:unauthorized - During secondary validation: No TXT record found at _acme-challenge.tilde.mywire.org (ca=https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory)","attempt":1,"retrying_in":60,"elapsed":7.429886971,"max_duration":2592000}

And some lines refer specifically to a TXT field to be put in DNS records, as I read here I should put that record at _acme-challenge.<YOUR_DOMAIN> . But there is … a but! As free user of Dynu’s services I cannot create any TXT record in my DNS zone… so I’m trying to understand if there is another way or if I have to pay to get what I want.

PS: thanks so much for all the explanations of your previous reply, I’ve learnt a lot of stuff!