Who benefits from this? Even though Let’s Encrypt stresses that most site operators will do fine sticking with ordinary domain certificates, there are still scenarios where a numeric identifier is the only practical choice:
Infrastructure services such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) – where clients may pin a literal IP address for performance or censorship-evasion reasons.
IoT and home-lab devices – think network-attached storage boxes, for example, living behind static WAN addresses.
Ephemeral cloud workloads – short-lived back-end servers that spin up with public IPs faster than DNS records can propagate.
I just use openssl"s built in management. I have scripts that set it up and generate a
.lan
domain, and instructions for adding it to clients. I could make a repo and writeup if you would like?As the other commenter pointed out,
.lan
is not officially sanctioned for local use, but it is not used publicly and is a common choice. However you could use whatever you want.