Menu
tconroy
By:
tconroy

letsencrypt cron job auto-renew is not working (Ubuntu/Nginx droplet)?

August 17, 2016 2k views
Let's Encrypt Nginx Ubuntu

Hi!

I followed this DO guide to configure LetsEncrypt for my server: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-14-04

The guide worked great, however the auto-renew cron job does not seem to fire on my server. I keep having to go in and manually run the update command to get my certs renewed.

I followed the guide carefully and placed the following in my crontab ( sudo crontab -e )

30 2 * * 1 /opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto renew >> /var/log/le-renew.log
35 2 * * 1 /etc/init.d/nginx reload

here is a dump from the le-renew.log file... I'm not a backend guy so I may have missed something but I did not notice anything fishy. https://gist.github.com/tconroy/81187d31badd09cc0e2b468997cf1549

wonder if there's any extra configuration I need to do to get auto-renew working?

Thank you!

1 comment
  • sierracircle August 17, 2016

    same here.
    Someone had a thread about this, so the issue seems to be more than just a few standalone isntances.

    I just switched to using Acme:
    https://github.com/hlandau/acme

    Once I figured out how to set it up, it is amazingly simple and works fine.
    but I will not know if cron is working or not until my certs are due.

Log In to Comment
2 Answers
ryanpq MOD August 22, 2016

This question was answered by @sierracircle:

same here.
Someone had a thread about this, so the issue seems to be more than just a few standalone isntances.

I just switched to using Acme:
https://github.com/hlandau/acme

Once I figured out how to set it up, it is amazingly simple and works fine.
but I will not know if cron is working or not until my certs are due.

View the original comment

Reply
mcinteemasud August 2, 2017

This is late, but for anyone else having the problem. I had to make the cron job stop nginx, renew the certificate, then start nginx to work. Otherwise the server is using the port that lets encrypt needs. Here is what I did
15 3 * * * /usr/bin/certbot renew --quiet --pre-hook "/bin/systemctl stop nginx" --post-hook "/bin/systemctl start nginx"

Here is the documentation:
https://certbot.eff.org/docs/using.html#renewal

Reply
Have another answer? Share your knowledge.

Related Questions