The HTTP challenge proves a domain by being visited on port 80, which requires
the name to already resolve to this machine — which is exactly what is not true
at the moment somebody is setting one up. certbot then fails with "Some
challenges have failed" and a 500 that says nothing about why.
The DNS challenge has no such requirement: it proves ownership by writing a
record. That needs the registrar's API key, and this must not go looking for
one — Officer stores DNS provider keys encrypted and never returns them, to
anybody. /domains/certificate exists for precisely this: it works out which
provider owns the name from the Domains list, decrypts the key itself, and hands
back NPM's answer. The key is used and never seen.
Its refusals are translated rather than shown raw. "Not in the domain list" is a
true sentence that tells nobody what to do; which list, and who can add to it,
is the part that matters.
And the button says it is issuing, because a DNS record has to propagate before
Let's Encrypt will look for it — the wait is minutes, and a spinner sitting for
three of them with no explanation is indistinguishable from one that has hung.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
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