Create Letsencrypt Wildcard Certificate

this post is base on you have base knowledge about letsencrypt and certbot

The command to create a wildcard certificate is pretty easy, for example with domain *.lecy.cc

certbot certonly --manual --manual-public-ip-logging-ok --preferred-challenges dns-01 --server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory -d "*.lecy.cc"

after run this command on your server, you will got outputs like this:

Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator manual, Installer None
Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing...
Renewing an existing certificate
Performing the following challenges:
dns-01 challenge for lecy.cc

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Please deploy a DNS TXT record under the name
_acme-challenge.lecy.cc with the following value:

n6PilMLOcM2ADfD78HDTuYqzY1ylRZo06ngQPDld-BI

Before continuing, verify the record is deployed.
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Press Enter to Continue

So, before press Enter, we need to go to our DNS management, maybe godaddy, to add or edit a txt record, the name should be _acme-challenge, and type should be txt, value is from the output.

It may take several minutes to refresh the record. So I suggest you to check if the txt record refreshed successfully or not before press Enter.

a easy way to check is to check here: THIS PAGE

Once we found the txt record refreshed, we can press Enter and certbot will do the work left.

Waiting for verification...
Cleaning up challenges

IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/lecy.cc-0001/fullchain.pem
   Your key file has been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/lecy.cc-0001/privkey.pem
   Your cert will expire on 2024-05-26. To obtain a new or tweaked
   version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot
   again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run
   "certbot renew"
 - If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:

   Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt:   https://letsencrypt.org/donate
   Donating to EFF:                    https://eff.org/donate-le

After these steps, you can update the configuration of your nginx or apache to match the new certification files.

That’s it!