Question

Lets Encrypt SSL no renewals were attempted

I’m trying to renewal my SSL certificate on my sit, when I run:

certbot renew

I get “No renewals were attempted” and when I run certbot certificates, I get “no certs found”.

I can see files in the /etc/letsencrypt for the site.com and www.site.com/

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Bobby Iliev • November 6, 2019
Accepted Answer

Hi all,

As this turned out to be a long discussion, I will summarize it so that it is easier for anyone else who comes across this to find the solution:

  • The problem affected the Ghose droplets created from the DigitalOcean Marketplace

  • The problem was an outdated acme.sh script. The error that we were getting was:

Could not get nonce, let's try again.
  • To fix the issue we had to update the script from the dev branch of the acme repo:
sudo /etc/letsencrypt/acme.sh  --upgrade -b dev
  • After that, we noticed that the updated script was stored at:
/root/.acme.sh/acme.sh
  • To renew the SSL certificate we had to run:
/root/.acme.sh/acme.sh --force --renew --home /etc/letsencrypt --domain yourdomain.com --webroot /var/www/ghost/system/nginx-root --reloadcmd "nginx -s reload" --accountemail yourmail@yourdomain.com
  • We also had to adjust the cronjob so that the certificate could be renewed automatically, so we had to change the path from /etc/letsencrypt/acme.sh to /root/.acme.sh/acme.sh, to do that just run:
crontab -e

Find the acme.sh cronjob and change the path accordingly.

Hope that this helps anyone who comes across the same issue! Regards, Bobby

Bobby Iliev • October 28, 2019

Hello,

I could suggest a couple of things here:

  • Check the /etc/letsencrypt/renewal log

  • Try running the command with -v for more information, and then check the log again

  • Try running certbot renew --dry-run and check the output

  • Share your Nginx/Apache Vhost here so that I could advise you further

Regards, Bobby

Graeme • November 5, 2019

Thank you @bobbyiliev, you deserve a good Christmas bonus this year!

I needed to make sure I had renewed by www cert and then it showed. Fingers crossed it will auto renew aswell

paulkeller • November 5, 2019

yes that solved it! whoever you are, you are a hero, thanks for helping with this! Do you have any idea if the cert will now auto renew going forward?