Attempting to renew cert produced an unexpected error: The nginx plugin is not working; there may be problems with your existing configuration. The error was: NoInstallationError(). Skipping

Try with sudo:
sudo find / -name nginx.pid

Also:
sudo ls -l /var/run/*.pid
sudo ls -l /run/*.pid

Here is the output:

tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:80 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 10192/nginx: worker
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:443 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 10192/nginx: worker
tcp6 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN 10192/nginx: worker
tcp6 0 0 :::443 :::* LISTEN 10192/nginx: worker

This command had no output.

Here is the output:

Job for nginx.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status nginx.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

Here is the output:

tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:80 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 10192/nginx: worker
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:443 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 10192/nginx: worker
tcp6 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN 10192/nginx: worker
tcp6 0 0 :::443 :::* LISTEN 10192/nginx: worker

This command still had no output!

There was no nginx.pid.

There was no nginx.pid.

I really appreciate your help, thanks!

This is unreal.
I would just kill nginx:
kill 10192
and restart nginx:

Or, if all else fails, just reboot the whole system.
That should restart nginx.

Incredible! I rebooted the system and it worked. I wonder why this was necessary? It renewed automatically many times before I ran into this problem. Hopefully it will work again next time.

Thank you SO MUCH!

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All I can see is that the PID was somehow deleted while the program was still running.
This put it into a weird place - that is unhandled by the service start/stop/restart logic.

So, I guess the takeaway is:
If you are unable to stop/start/restart nginx (or any other service) make sure the PID file exists.
If it doesn’t (there may be other more clever solutions, but a simple fix is to) just reboot; And let things startup properly all on their own.
:slight_smile:

Makes sense! Thanks again! :slight_smile:

You may be able to somewhat test that out by issuing:
sudo systemctl stop nginx.service
sudo systemctl start nginx.service
[now while the PID file exists]

If these return no errors, then I feel comfortable with leaving well enough alone.

It worked, and there were no errors! :grin::+1:

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