Letsencrypt acme-challenge on wordpress or asp.net mvc

Question

I have been trying without success to generate security certificates for my company using Let's Encrypt. My company uses WordPress 3.9.7 for its main website and I am not allow to upgrade to a newer version since that is handled by a third party company. The website is running on top of Internet Information Services 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2. My question is: How can I make wordpress handle http://www.company.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/mftvrU2brecAXB76BsLEqW_SL_srdG3oqTQTzR5KHeA ? I have already created a new empty page and a new template that returns exactly what let's encrypt is expecting but wordpress keeps returning a 404 for that page. My guess is that the problem arise with the dot(.) at the beginning of the route (".well-known") but I don't know how to solve that on wordpress.

I am also able to use an asp.net mvc website and make IIS point to that website for a while. Not a good idea though since clients may not be able to reach our website for a few minutes, but still an option. Then the question is: How can I create a controller or a route with a dot(".") at the beginning of the name? Help will be really appreciated.

Answer 1

For ASP.Net MVC or Web Forms, with certain Routing configs, you'll end up treating this URL as something for the Routing Engine to hand off to the MVC/Forms Handler, not a static file return. The result will be a 404 or a 503. The solution is surprisingly very simple:

If you haven't already, place the Challenge file:

1. Create the necessary dirs - .well-known is tricky mostly because Microsoft is lazy, but you can either do it from cmdline or create the folder as .well-known. and Windows Explorer will notice the workaround and remove the trailing period for you.
2. Inside \.well-known\acme-challenge place the challenge file with the proper name and contents. You can go about this part any way you like; I happen to use Git Bash like echo "oo0acontents" > abcdefilename

Then make a Web.Config file in the acme-challenge dir with these contents:

<?xml version = "1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <staticContent>
            <clear />
            <mimeMap fileExtension = ".*" mimeType="text/json" />
        </staticContent>

        <handlers>
            <clear />
            <add name="StaticFile" path="*" verb="*" modules="StaticFileModule,DefaultDocumentModule" 
            resourceType="Either" requireAccess="Read" />  
        </handlers>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Source: https://github.com/Lone-Coder/letsencrypt-win-simple/issues/37

Done. The file will start returning instead of 404/503 allowing the Challenge to complete - you can now Submit and get your domain validated.

Aside: The above code snippet sets the content-type to json, a historical requirement that is no longer relevant to letsencrypt. The current requirement is there is no requirement - you can send a content-type of pantsless/elephants and it'll still work.