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Question

Website inaccessible after installing Let's encrypt certificate

Posted September 23, 2019 4.2k views
NginxLet's Encrypt

Hello,
I set up a droplet and configured nginx to serve a small static website. Everything was working fine until I installed a certificate using the Certbot script.

This is the nginx configuration file for the website:

server {

    root /var/www/angelacapillo.com;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    server_name angelacapillo.com www.angelacapillo.com;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/angelacapillo.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/angelacapillo.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot
}

server {
    if ($host = www.angelacapillo.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot

    if ($host = angelacapillo.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot

    server_name angelacapillo.com www.angelacapillo.com;
    listen 80;
    return 404; # managed by Certbot
}

Following their instructions, I tested the certificate here but I get an error: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.angelacapillo.com

What might be the issue?

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qarlo
By:
qarlo

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2 answers
bobbyiliev September 23, 2019

Hello @qarlo,

The syntax of your configuration file looks fine. What I could suggest here is:

  • First check if nginx is running:
systemctl status nginx
  • If Nginx is not running you could try starting it:
systemctl start nginx
  • If this is not the case, check if Nginx is actually listening on port 443:
netstat -plant | grep 443
  • If you don’t see any output, run a config test:
nginx -t
  • And if you get Syntax OK restart Nginx:
systemctl restart nginx
  • Lastly if all that does not help, make sure to check your Nginx error logs:
tail -100 /var/log/nginx/error.log

Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Bobby

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  • qarlo September 24, 2019

    Hello,
    thanks a lot for your detailed answer.

    Running nginx -t produces these errors:

    nginx: [alert] could not open error log file: open() "/var/log/nginx/error.log" failed (13: Permission denied)
2019/09/24 07:27:56 [warn] 22638#22638: the "user" directive makes sense only if the master process runs with super-user privileges, ignored in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:1
2019/09/24 07:27:56 [emerg] 22638#22638: BIO_new_file("/etc/letsencrypt/live/angelacapillo.com/fullchain.pem") failed (SSL: error:0200100D:system library:fopen:Permission denied:fopen('/etc/letsencrypt/live/angelacapillo.com/fullchain.pem','r') error:2006D002:BIO routines:BIO_new_file:system lib)
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test failed

    I’ve tried reading a bit about it, but I’m not sure how to fix it.

    There are the nginx processes:

    > ps aux | grep [n]ginx
root      6692  0.0  0.9 143092  9156 ?        Ss   Sep22   0:00 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on;
www-data  6810  0.0  0.6 145392  6540 ?        S    Sep22   0:00 nginx: worker process

    Thanks again for your help

    Reply Report
    • bobbyiliev September 24, 2019

      Hello,

      I think that you need to run nginx -t with sudo:

      sudo nginx -t

      If you get Syntax OK try restarting Nginx:

      systemctl restart nginx

      Then check if it is listening on port 443:

      netstat -plant | grep 443

      Let me know how that goes.
      Regards,
      Bobby

      Reply Report
      • qarlo September 24, 2019

        You’re right.
        So, syntax is ok and restarting Nginx doesn’t work. I mean, the command works, but the website is still inaccessible.

        And then:

        
> sudo netstat -plant | grep 443

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:443             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      23455/nginx: master

        Thanks again

        Reply Report
        • bobbyiliev September 25, 2019

          Hi @qarlo,

          That is quite interesting. Can you check if there are any errors in your error log:

          sudo tail -100 /var/log/nginx/error.log

          Also, one thing that initially I totally forgot about, can you check if port 443 is open via your firewall? If you are using Ubuntu you could do that with:

          sudo ufw status

          If you don’t see port 443 or https there, then you need to make sure that you open that port so that traffic could go through:

          sudo ufw allow 443

          Let me know how it goes!
          Regards,
          Bobby

          Reply Report
snidhidev September 9, 2020

For the benefit of future readers, I had the same issue after installing the Lets encrypt certificate using certbot.

Attempts to reload/restart nginx failed with errors already documented in this thread.
systemctl status nginx showed that the nginx service had failed starting.

Because DO Firewall was in place, ufw was inactive.

Checking the ports showed that nginx processes were (still/already) listening to the port 443.

Rebooting the ubuntu server resolved the issue.

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