Unable to join an instance to the hub

Question
1

Hi, I’m currently reviewing Certify the Web for my company.

I tried to join an instance of Certify Certificate Manager (Desktop) to the hub.

The documentation mentioned this, but the option is not there in the UI.

I also tried this method, it shows a console window for a split second and nothing happened. And the number of instances on the hub doesn’t change.

The command I’m running in PowerShell is in this format:

& 'C:\Program Files\CertifyTheWeb\Certify.exe' hub join https://xxxxxxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxxxxxxxxxxx managedinstance_sp_01 xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

Could anyone please clarify if this is at all possible with the community edition?

Thank you.

2

Hi,

Thanks for trying out the Management Hub beta. To join an instance to the hub you need to be using Certify Certificate Manager v7.x (beta) to join the hub, and you will find the option under Settings - Management Hub:

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image1530×1190 38.8 KB

The command line option is planned but not yet available, so the docs are misleading in that regard, there is a way to do it using an http request (like Certify Management Agent (Linux, macOS) | Certify The Web Docs) but we’ll likely just go ahead with the cli option for windows,

3

Thank you for your prompt response. I really appreciate it.

I was trying the http request method as well but getting this:

$ curl -v -X POST http://127.0.0.2:9696/api/system/hub/join -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"clientId":"managedinstance_sp_01","secret":"xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx","url":"https://xxxxxxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxxxxxxx.xxx"}'
Note: Unnecessary use of -X or --request, POST is already inferred.
*   Trying 127.0.0.2:9696...
* Connected to 127.0.0.2 (127.0.0.2) port 9696
> POST /api/system/hub/join HTTP/1.1
> Host: 127.0.0.2:9696
> User-Agent: curl/8.9.0
> Accept: */*
> Content-Type: application/json
> Content-Length: 132
>
* upload completely sent off: 132 bytes
< HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
< Content-Length: 0
< Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
< WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate
< WWW-Authenticate: NTLM
< Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2025 05:20:44 GMT
<
* Connection #0 to host 127.0.0.2 left intact

Could you please tell me if it is somehow possible with the version below 7?

Thank you.

4

Hi,

For now I would recommend using the UI, and it has to be v7 because v6 just doesn’t know how to talk to the management hub at all, or perform commands from the hub.

To actually get the POST method to work you’d need to authenticate using administrator basic credentials because on windows the service communication requires Windows Authentication. I haven’t actually tried it using curl on windows, the instructions I linked are mainly for Linux, it would be easier using powershell like Invoke-RestMethod -Uri http://localhost:9696/api/system/appversion -UseDefaultCredentials

5

v6 just doesn’t know how to talk to the management hub at all, or perform commands from the hub.

I see. Thanks for clarifying.

May I know how mature your paid version is compared to all this beta and alpha stuff you put on the website?

Thank you.

6

Certify Certificate Manager has been around since late 2015 and has been commercial since 2017. Our current stable version is 6.x Release Notes - Certify Certificate Manager - Certify The Web - ACME for Windows, simple free certificates for IIS and more, powered by Let's Encrypt and other ACME CAs

We are using v7 (hub and desktop app) in production internally and it’s likely to go stable within the next couple of months.

The paid and free community versions are identical software, the alpha/beta versions are just previews of the next major release.

The Management Hub has been alpha for user feedback since May and recently turned beta, meaning the current feature set is being stabilized for release. v7 of the desktop app has the same core as the management hub and agent etc and has approximately 2 years of additional changes compared to the 6.x release, so the process of moving to a full release has been quite gradual.

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