Get alerted when assets are down, slow, or vulnerable to SSL attacks—all free for a month. Learn more

Question

Can't renew Let'sEncript Cert on my Ghost Blog

Hi,

The certbot was unable to renew my certificate in the ghost subdomain I have this output when running :

sudo certbot certonly --webroot --webroot-path=/var/www/ghost -d blog.hatandslash.com -d www.blog.hatandslash.com

Failed authorization procedure. blog.hatandslash.com (http-01): urn:acme:error:unauthorized :: The client lacks sufficient authorization :: Invalid response from http://blog.hatandslash.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/N0DCgm6dmkv5Wv6KSoBUuFkf0zqOTD76pOR5INinHBY: "<html>
<head><title>404 Not Found</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center>
<hr><center>", www.blog.hatandslash.com (http-01): urn:acme:error:unauthorized :: The client lacks sufficient authorization :: Invalid response from http://www.blog.hatandslash.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/GxhMHQv903Ct6UJhIuA7hGMUzeRySxUs4_o5LlYjUlg: "<html>
<head><title>404 Not Found</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center>
<hr><center>"

IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - The following errors were reported by the server:

   Domain: blog.hatandslash.com
   Type:   unauthorized
   Detail: Invalid response from
   http://blog.hatandslash.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/N0DCgm6dmkv5Wv6KSoBUuFkf0zqOTD76pOR5INinHBY:
   "<html>
   <head><title>404 Not Found</title></head>
   <body bgcolor="white">
   <center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center>
   <hr><center>"

   Domain: www.blog.hatandslash.com
   Type:   unauthorized
   Detail: Invalid response from
   http://www.blog.hatandslash.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/GxhMHQv903Ct6UJhIuA7hGMUzeRySxUs4_o5LlYjUlg:
   "<html>
   <head><title>404 Not Found</title></head>
   <body bgcolor="white">
   <center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center>
   <hr><center>"

   To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was
   entered correctly and the DNS A record(s) for that domain
   contain(s) the right IP address.

I have checked the folder permisions and these are:

drwxr-xr-x   6 ghost ghost   4096 May 11 21:09 .
drwxr-xr-x   6 root  root    4096 May  9 23:58 ..
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost   4511 Jan 12 12:20 config.example.js
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost   4784 Feb  5 18:14 config.js
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost   4510 Jan 31 02:24 config.js.save
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost   4776 Feb  5 20:15 config.js.save.1
drwxr-xr-x   6 ghost ghost   4096 Jan 12 12:26 content
drwxr-xr-x   5 ghost ghost   4096 Jan 12 12:26 core
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost  31937 Jan 12 12:20 Gruntfile.js
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost    725 Jan 12 12:20 index.js
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost   1065 Jan 12 12:20 LICENSE
drwxr-xr-x 103 ghost ghost   4096 Jan 30 19:42 node_modules
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost 211911 Jan 12 12:26 npm-shrinkwrap.json
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost   3029 Jan 12 12:20 package.json
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost   2942 Jan 12 12:20 PRIVACY.md
-rwxr-xr-x   1 ghost ghost   4710 Jan 12 12:20 README.md
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  root    4096 May 11 22:33 .well-known

But there the acme-challenge folder is missing.

I have already tried to change the permissions to 755 or assign the group user to www-data:www-data and still nothing works.

Submit an answer

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!

Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in Q&A, subscribe to topics of interest, and get courses and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business.

Kamal Nasser • May 24, 2017

Hi!

I’m assuming that you have set up nginx to proxy requests to the Ghost app. In that case, Ghost does not serve static files from /var/www/ghost. You will need to override the proxy settings for /.well-known urls and configure nginx to serve those files directly. Once you have done that, Let’s Encrypt will be able to verify your ownership of the domain and renew your certificate.

Add the following lines to your nginx server block above the location / {} block that includes the proxying-related directives:

        location ~ /.well-known {
                allow all;
                root /var/www/ghost;
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }

Reload nginx and you should now be able to renew your certificate. Let me know how that goes!

P.S. I would suggest using a different directory to keep things clean and separate. For example, /var/www or any other directory.

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $100 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up