We all love free stuff and I especially love the free SSL certificates from LetsEncrypt, but unless you’re a dab hand at the CLI and can ensure you get the right spellings of your IIS bindings and Web roots, or have an administration website like Plesk (which I highly recommend!), it would be nice if there was just a nice simple GUI to do it for you.

So, hunting around, I see a few free programs, but some of them are either limited to 5 sites or are not for commercial use, but I stumbled across a great CLI client called WinCertes! It didn’t seem to have any limitations and does the job brilliantly. Except. It’s CLI only.

So, that’s where I come in! I’ve simply forked the Git repository, converted it to .NET 5.0 and created a nice simple GUI to save you all the hassle of the command line! It even gets all your sites from IIS, so it’s simple to set up free certificates on your sites with no knowledge of the command line!

I’ve obviously kept with the spirit of GPL, so it’s still free and open sourced, but I’ve created a new installation for you, so you don’t have to compile! I’ll issue a pull request to the original repository when I’ve done a bit more testing, so I’ve labelled it as Beta at the moment, but I’ve issued multiple certificates and it all works fine so far! I suppose it’s just waiting to ensure the renewal works!

If you want to take a look, simply pop to GitHub at: https://github.com/peterlgarland/WinCertes