Question

Is there any way to delete duplicate Let's Encrypt certificates from Plesk Admin?

Hi! I have a following problem:

Earlier this month, I decided to remove the Plesk control panel add-on from my WordPress droplet, due to it not being free anymore. However, what I soon noticed is that, once a day, I’m receiving an email from Plesk, where it is stated that it could not issue/renew a Let’s Encrypt certificate. This is the error message I initially received once per day for first few days.

      Could not renew Let`s Encrypt certificates for (My WordPress site) (login admin). Please log in to Plesk and renew the certificates listed below manually. 
      Renewal of the following Let`s Encrypt certificates has failed: 
      ** 'Lets Encrypt certificate' [days to expire: 29] ** 
      [-] (my Plesk Admin page domain)
      List certificates failure: The license key is invalid. 
      In order to use Plesk, please obtain and install a new valid license key.
      The amount of currently used resources exceeds the limits defined by your license. 

However, after those first few days, I still receive that error message once a day, but the error message has changed to this:

      Type: urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rateLimited
      Status: 429
      Detail: too many certificates (5) already issued for this exact set of domains in the last 168h0m0s, retry after 2024-09-29 06:57:45 UTC: 
      see https://letsencrypt.org/docs/duplicate-certificate-limit/ 

Yesterday, I changed my mind and I bought that Plesk add-on again from the marketplace and attached it to my droplet (I had no issues doing this and managed to activate that Plesk no problem). However, I still received that same error message into my email earlier today. Based on my emails, my Plesk admin tries to renew a Let’s Encrypt certificate every 25 hours, but can’t do it since there are already too many certificates.

What I also did notice is that when I searched list of certificates assigned to my Plesk Admin page (on https://crt.sh) I can see this (I’ve blurred all sensitive information):

Let's Encrypt Certificates on Crt.Sh
My Let’s Encrypt Certificates shown on Crt.Sh

This is definitely not normal! And pretty much all of those certificates were added when my add-on was disabled.

I’ve already tried to fix this in Plesk admin. There, I went to “Tools and Settings” -> “SSL/TLS Certificates” and attempted to reissue the Let’s Encrypt certificate by clicking corresponding button there. It didn’t work and instead, I encountered that same error I receive in my email. It seems like I can’t reissue a certificate since there are already way too many certificates assigned to my Plesk admin page.

I have found a way to revoke a certificate of my WordPress-site where that Plesk Control Panel has been attached, but I haven’t found a way to revoke certificates assigned to the Plesk admin page itself. And just to make it clear, I have no problems with my WordPress-site itself with this!

My concern is this: since that currently valid certificate on my Plesk Admin page expires in about 10 days, what should I do?

How can I delete those extra Let’s Encrypt certificates that are meant to my Plesk Admin page? Or is the only way to fix this is just waiting until they all have expired, which would take up to three months?

Many thanks!


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KFSys
Site Moderator
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September 29, 2024

Heya,

First, give the following article a try:

https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/12377514616215-How-to-remove-an-SSL-certificate-in-Plesk

There is a section which states on how to remove a certificate from the admin area. Then try to install the new one from the admin area.

If it doesn’t work you can always use the certbot command from your console however I am not sure how Plesk will react to it. When I’ve worked with plesk(a few years back) it was really touchy and didn’t like when I did stuff on my own.

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