easy-rsa VS FreeIPA

Easy-rsa to the rescue. Been using it for a while, works great and makes life easier :)

Link: https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa

Summary from that page:

easy-rsa is a CLI utility to build and manage a PKI CA. In laymen's terms, this means to create a root certificate authority, and request and sign certificates, including intermediate CAs and certificate revocation lists (CRL).

No, OpenVPN relies on the CA trust model. Anyone signed by the CA has access, unless they have been revoked (CRL): https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa/blob/master/doc/EasyRSA-Renew-and-Revoke.md

Then make do with the CLI. There might be some tooling to help you, e.g. https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa

Hey folks. I'm one of the authors for Mastering OpenVPN, the author of Troubleshooting OpenVPN, and the maintainer of EasyRSA. In light of Apollo and other 3rd party apps going dark on the 30th, I figured I'd "turn in my notice" on Reddit and do the normal sysadmin data dump/brown bag before I'm gone. I've really enjoyed this group and hope things get sorted in the long run.

Correct. That applies to OpenVPN. There's a tool that OpenRSA maintains that help with creating those certificates, EasyRSA: https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa

Regarding the keys, csr and certificates it's pretty easy to manage them with easy-rsa (https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa)

$ git clone https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa.git

Depending on your use case, either https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert or https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa

If you can add CAs to the hosts that will access this server, you can be your own certificate authority. mkcert is good, as mentioned elsewhere, or you can go all out: https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa

I also want to try FreeIPA but as it's built on top of 389ds I'm afraid that it's gonna be as big of a memory hog (will try it later anyways) and has many things I don't and won't need, which I'm afraid would add complexity to setup.

FreeIPA server and replicas

A good place to start might be FreeIPA.

FreeIPA1 is not written in PHP. I believe you are confusing it with another project, maybe FreePBX which is written in PHP?

I had Fedora 34 installed to an SD card for a FreeIPA node which worked well. It was most likely an earlier release (32 or 33) running on a Pi 3B which would occasionally run out of memory, so the whole thing got transplanted to a Pi 4 with 4GB. I'm pretty sure I used the disk image to install since I like to start from a minimal image and only install what I need.

Take a look at FreeIPA

https://www.freeipa.org/page/Main_Page and https://github.com/freeipa/freeipa/tree/master/doc/workshop