Question

Obtaining a Certbot SSL Certificate fails

Following through the tutorial (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-18-04), when trying to obtain an SSL cert in Step-4 (sudo certbot --nginx -d <mydomain>.com -d www.<mydomain>.com), I get the following error:

  • The following errors were reported by the server:

    Domain: www.<mydomain>.com Type: None Detail: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for www.<mydomain>.com

    • check that a DNS record exists for this domain

    Domain: <mydomain>.com Type: None Detail: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for <mydomain>.com - check that a DNS record exists for this domain

I have done this many times in the past for other domains and this is the first time I get an error. I have made all the prerequisites mentioned at the beginning of the article, as always, but still I cannot figure where the problem is.


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.

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
January 19, 2021
Accepted Answer

Hi there,

It looks like that your domain name either does not have an A record or the A record is not pointing to the Droplet’s IP address.

I could recommend checking your DNS records via this tool here and making sure that the IP address matches the IP of your Droplet:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tools/dns

Let me know how it goes. Regards, Bobby

Hi Bobby,

Thanks for your prompt reply. Actually there was a “silly” mistake. The configuration is right but since this is a new site I had to wait a couple of hours because the DNSs have not been updated. Everything is ok now. Thank again.

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