Question

Lets Encrypt SSL no renewals were attempted

Posted on October 28, 2019
Let's Encrypt Ubuntu 18.04
Asked by Graeme

I’m trying to renewal my SSL certificate on my sit, when I run:

certbot renew

I get “No renewals were attempted” and when I run certbot certificates, I get “no certs found”.

I can see files in the /etc/letsencrypt for the site.com and www.site.com/

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• November 6, 2019

Accepted Answer

Hi all,

As this turned out to be a long discussion, I will summarize it so that it is easier for anyone else who comes across this to find the solution:

The problem affected the Ghose droplets created from the DigitalOcean Marketplace
The problem was an outdated acme.sh script. The error that we were getting was:

Could not get nonce, let's try again.

To fix the issue we had to update the script from the dev branch of the acme repo:

sudo /etc/letsencrypt/acme.sh  --upgrade -b dev

After that, we noticed that the updated script was stored at:

/root/.acme.sh/acme.sh

To renew the SSL certificate we had to run:

/root/.acme.sh/acme.sh --force --renew --home /etc/letsencrypt --domain yourdomain.com --webroot /var/www/ghost/system/nginx-root --reloadcmd "nginx -s reload" --accountemail yourmail@yourdomain.com

We also had to adjust the cronjob so that the certificate could be renewed automatically, so we had to change the path from /etc/letsencrypt/acme.sh to /root/.acme.sh/acme.sh, to do that just run:

crontab -e

Find the acme.sh cronjob and change the path accordingly.

Hope that this helps anyone who comes across the same issue! Regards, Bobby

Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• October 28, 2019

Hello,

I could suggest a couple of things here:

Check the /etc/letsencrypt/renewal log
Try running the command with -v for more information, and then check the log again
Try running certbot renew --dry-run and check the output
Share your Nginx/Apache Vhost here so that I could advise you further