Question

Obtaining a Certbot SSL Certificate fails

Posted on January 19, 2021
DNS Networking
Asked by adrianosdervis

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.

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• 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

adrianosdervis • January 19, 2021

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.