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SSL cert renewed but droplet didn't apply it.

Posted on March 31, 2021

This might seem like an odd issue but I’ve checked in the past and saw that my SSL certificate was set to auto renew on 3/30/2021. I got an email from a client saying their site was showing a not secure error. I sshed into the droplet and I can see the SSL cert was automatically renewed. I actually had to reboot my droplet in order for it to recognize the new SSL cert. Is this normal? Anything I can do to prevent having to reboot the droplet next time my SSL renews?



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Hi @dgrimesbusiness,

Hmm, that’s weird. What you can try next time is to restart your WebService (Apache/Nginx). Basically, when you make a change like this or editting anything in the configuration, you’ll need to restart/reload your WebService (if it’s a change there of course) so that change actually is applied.

To do so, you can do

Ubuntu/Nginx

systemctl restart nginx

Ubuntu/Apahce

systemctl restart apache2

CentOS/Nginx

systemctl restart nginx

CentOS/Apahce

systemctl restart httpd

Regards, KFSys

Hi @dgrimesbusiness,

I see you have experienced the same issue, I’m sad to hear that!

Anyway, I tried some other stuff to see if I can help you out. It seems the following service should be restarted when a new certificate has been installed:

service lsws restart

Maybe you can try and add it to be executed when the system certbot.service executes the certificate renewal.

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