Question

LetsEncrypt Renewal Failure

HI, I’m trying to renew my Let’s Encrypt certificate and it’s giving me an error PluginError((‘There has been an error in parsing the file (%s): %s’, u’/etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf.save’, u’Syntax error’),). Skipping.

Screenshot- Click Here

Please help me my certificate is going to expire in few hours and I’ve spent all day to find the solution.


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.

Ryan Quinn
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
August 25, 2016
Accepted Answer

What files are located in /etc/apache2/sites-available/

The presence of a .save file makes me think that you may have used an editor to modify your 000-default.conf file which created a backup (as the .save).

If the configuration in your 000-default.conf file looks correct you should be able to safely delete (or move somewhere else) the 000-default.conf.save file and try the renewal again.

FInally, after two hours of struggle, I landed on this page and this was the exact problem. Just deleted the .saved file and the renewal worked.

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel