Question

Website inaccessible after installing Let's encrypt certificate

Posted on September 23, 2019
Let's Encrypt Nginx
Asked by qarlo

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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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• September 23, 2019

Accepted Answer

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

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.