Question

How to apply Digital Ocean Let's Encrypt certificate?

Hi! I had my website setup with a Let’s Encrypt certification using the certbot command. I guess I messed up the autorenew, because it expired recently. When I went to go renew it, I found that under Account -> Security there was a section to press a button and create an auto-renewing certificate, no Linux required. I created a certificate, but Firefox still says the certificate is expired when I try to access the website.

I have my domain from Google Domains (I guess Squarespace now?) pointing to the DigitalOcean nameservers, and then my DNS is set up on DigitalOcean. I thought that the certificate I created would be applied automatically since I use DigitalOcean DNS, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. How do I get that certification to go into effect? Do I have to configure something within nginx?


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KFSys
Site Moderator
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November 22, 2023
Accepted Answer

Heya @16650610e4b04364a53b38ec08bfe9,

If you are using a Droplet, the certificate can’t be added automatically.

If you are indeed using a Droplet, I’ll recommend you to SSH to your Droplet and run the command

sudo certbot renew

If you have multiple certificates for different domains and you want to renew a specific certificate, use:

certbot certonly --force-renew -d example.com

Copy

The --force-renew flag tells Certbot to request a new certificate with the same domains as an existing certificate. The -d flag allows you renew certificates for multiple specific domains.

To verify that the certificate renewed, run:

sudo certbot renew --dry-run

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If the command returns no errors, the renewal was successful.

alexdo
Site Moderator
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November 30, 2023

Heya,

On a droplet you need to handle the installation manually.

You can check our docs on how to install an SSL Certificate here:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/support/how-do-i-install-an-ssl-certificate-on-a-droplet/

Regards

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