Document SSL reloading with Let's Encrypt

See gh-50222

Signed-off-by: henriquejsza <henriquejsza@gmail.com>
This commit is contained in:
henriquejsza
2026-05-30 12:02:09 +02:00
committed by Stéphane Nicoll
parent 30876aacc2
commit 4c8a95bcca
@@ -181,3 +181,31 @@ A file watcher is then watching the files and if they change, the SSL bundle wil
This in turn triggers a reload in the consuming component, e.g. Tomcat rotates the certificates in the SSL enabled connectors.
You can configure the quiet period (to make sure that there are no more changes) of the file watcher with the configprop:spring.ssl.bundle.watch.file.quiet-period[] property.
[[features.ssl.reloading.lets-encrypt]]
=== Reloading SSL Bundles With Let's Encrypt
If you use certificates issued by https://letsencrypt.org/[Let's Encrypt] and renewed by an external tool, such as https://certbot.eff.org/[Certbot], you can configure a PEM bundle to use the files from the `live` directory and enable reloading:
[configprops,yaml]
----
spring:
ssl:
bundle:
pem:
web-server:
reload-on-update: true
keystore:
certificate: "file:/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem"
private-key: "file:/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem"
server:
ssl:
bundle: "web-server"
----
Spring Boot does not request or renew Let's Encrypt certificates.
When Certbot or another ACME client updates the configured files, the SSL bundle is reloaded.
Compatible consumers, such as Tomcat and Netty web servers, can then use the updated certificate without restarting the application.
The files in `/etc/letsencrypt/live` are typically symbolic links to files in `/etc/letsencrypt/archive`.
The file watcher follows symbolic links so that updates to the target files can trigger a reload.