Discourse e Cloudflare

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

@epskpsdsc

always access the webserver for the HTTP-01 challenge through HTTPS, even with the Cloudflare Universal SSL cert in front of it, so one wouldn’t have to wait with turning on Orange Cloud until after LE cert is issued.

Yes, HTTP-01 challenge works in conjunction with Cloudflare in “orange cloud” mode. But it does not work over HTTPS, the HTTP-01 challenge only works over port 80, and:

Many people running Cloudflare set Cloudflare to automatically redirect HTTP to HTTPS, and that makes port 80 on the origin server unavailable, and that prevents HTTP-01 challenges from working.

So if you don’t enable those redirects, then it will work.

@Stephen

Let’s Encrypt will fail if Cloudflare is enabled before the intial cert is issued.

So strictly speaking this is untrue.
Let’s Encrypt will fail if Cloudflare is set to redirect traffic on port 80 before it reaches the origin server.