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Plesk droplet: Unable to secure site with Let's Encrypt - need help for beginner

Posted on July 2, 2020

Hello all,

I am new to using Digital Ocean and Plesk, so please pardon some of my technical weaknesses.

I installed a Plesk droplet (Ubuntu) and pointed my domain to the droplet. All that works fine. I installed Wordpress using Plesk, and that works fine too. I can access my domain, no problem.

The issue I have is that I simply am unable to install the Let’s Encrypt SSL via Plesk. Each time I try that, I get an error like this:

==== Details Could not issue a Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS certificate for powermanuscript.com. Authorization for the domain failed.

Details Invalid response from https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/acme/authz-v3/5623261675.

Details:

Type: urn:ietf:params:acme:error:dns

Status: 400

Detail: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up TXT for _acme-challenge.powermanuscript.com - check that a DNS record exists for this domain

=========

I’m not very technically savvy about DNS. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. My DNS entries in Digital Ocean have their A records. I don’t have any entry for TXT but I have no idea what I’m supposed to put there.

Can someone please help? It’s probably something simple but I have no idea what to look for.



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Hi there @dan15000,

As far as I can see the problem is due to the fact that your TXT record has been added under your Plesk DNS zone, however, your active DNS zone is under your DigitalOcean account.

What I could suggest is trying to manually copy over your TXT record for _acme-challenge.powermanuscript.com from your Plesk control panel to your DigitalOcean DNS zone. Then after that try to issue the Let’s Encrypt Certificate again.

If this does not work I would recommend trying out this Plesk extension here:

https://www.plesk.com/extensions/digitalocean-dns/

It will allow your Plesk DNS zone to be synced with your actual DigitalOcean DNS zone.

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby

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