Allow renew time relative to the expiration date

[AlexanderS]

You can now set a negative value for days, that will be subtracted from the expiration date of the generated certificate.

This will fix #3413.

[AlexanderS]

I do not think, the error of the pipeline is related to the pull request.

[saudiqbal]

Any update on this PR?

[saudiqbal]

??? Nothing?

[heiko3]

Unfortunately, there has been no response to the pull request yet. We've been using this change in production for a long time, and it works very well. Given the different expiration times for server certificates at different CAs, this is very helpful, and the expiration times will continue to change in the future, so this change is very important for automation.
It's a shame that the pull request hasn't been implemented yet.

[saudiqbal]

Looks like someone else needs to take over this project, acmesh-official is not doing anything for pull requests.

[lukastribus]

Ultimately #4944 ARI support is going to fulfill this need in most cases, I can see that the work has already began.

The change in this PR would still be useful nonetheless of course.

[saudiqbal]

Please approve the PR for relative expiry date.

[saudiqbal]

PR still not accepted!

[AlexanderS]

@neilpang Any comments on this? Did you maybe miss this PR by accident?

[neilpang]

please also add thie usage in the showhelp() method, so that everyone knows it can be negative numbers.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Adds support for configuring certificate renewal scheduling relative to the certificate’s expiration date (by allowing negative Le_RenewalDays), addressing scenarios with long-lived certificates (e.g., 1-year ACME certs) as described in #3413.

Changes:

• Introduces _enddate() to read notAfter from an issued certificate via OpenSSL.
• Introduces _ssldate2time() to convert OpenSSL -enddate output into epoch seconds.
• Updates next-renew-time calculation to support negative Le_RenewalDays as “expire time + (negative days)”.

[AlexanderS]

I have updated the PR and included the various suggestions from Copilot (although the extensive error checking does not align with other parts of the code).