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Get Started

Certboy is a unified certificate management tool that simplifies creating and managing a local PKI hierarchy: Root CA → Intermediate CA → TLS certificates.

Installation

Install from Release (Binary)

Download the latest release from GitHub Releases.

One-liner installation (Linux x86_64):

VERSION=$(curl -sL https://github.com/audricsun/certboy/releases/download/latest/STABLE.txt) && \
curl -sL "https://github.com/audricsun/certboy/releases/download/v${VERSION}/certboy-${VERSION}-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz" | tar xz && \
chmod +x certboy && \
sudo mv certboy /usr/local/bin/

For other architectures (Linux ARM64, macOS Intel, macOS Apple Silicon), see the GitHub Releases page.

Install with Cargo

If you have Rust installed:

cargo install certboy

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/audricsun/certboy.git
cd certboy
cargo build --release
sudo cp target/release/certboy /usr/local/bin/

Verify Installation

certboy --version

Quickstart

The fastest way to get started is to run the quickstart script, which creates a complete sandbox environment with multiple Root CAs, ICAs, and TLS certificates:

./scripts/quickstart.sh

This script demonstrates:

  • Step 1-2: Creating multiple Root CAs (example.io, sandbox.dev, corp.local)
  • Step 3-6: Creating Intermediate CAs under each Root CA
  • Step 7-8: Issuing TLS certificates signed by Root CAs and ICAs
  • Step 8b: Creating certificates with multiple domains and wildcards
  • Step 9: Checking all certificates
  • Step 10: Testing expiration alerts and renewal
  • Step 11: Testing import functionality
  • Step 12-14: Verifying certificate chains with OpenSSL
  • Step 15: Final verification of all certificates
  • Step 16: Testing export functionality

After running the script, explore the sandbox/ directory to see the complete PKI structure.

Next Steps