Certbot: "Invalid response" while trying to obtain a certificate

Help
1

Hi guys,

I’m having trouble getting a certificate for my Nginx webserver. Any idea what could be the problem?
I’m a real beginner in webhosting and ssl certificates so I’m hoping that the below info is of help.
Thank you for any help!!

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My domain is:
shin.go.ro
I ran this command:
certbot certonly --standalone
It produced this output:
Saving debug log to C:\Certbot\log\letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator standalone, Installer None
Please enter in your domain name(s) (comma and/or space separated) (Enter ‘c’
to cancel): shin.go.ro
Obtaining a new certificate
Performing the following challenges:
http-01 challenge for shin.go.ro
Waiting for verification…
e[31mChallenge failed for domain shin.go.roe[0m
http-01 challenge for shin.go.ro
Cleaning up challenges
e[31mSome challenges have failed.e[0m
e[1m
IMPORTANT NOTES:
e[0m - The following errors were reported by the server:

Domain: shin.go.ro
Type: unauthorized
Detail: Invalid response from
http://shin.go.ro/.well-known/acme-challenge/969mA7VrZemnlVd928AyTreupCRuKRQz4eF-61U7N8w
[79.115.212.18]: “\r\n404 Not
Found\r\n\r\n

404 Not
Found

\r\n
nginx/1.19.0</ce”

To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was
entered correctly and the DNS A/AAAA record(s) for that domain
contain(s) the right IP address.
My web server is (include version):
nginx 1.19.0
The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):
Windows 10
My hosting provider, if applicable, is:

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don’t know):
yes
I’m using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel):
no
The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you’re using Certbot):
certbot 1.5.0

1 Like
2

I believe that the current situation with Certbot on Windows is that you will need to stop nginx before running Certbot.

This might do the trick if it’s running as a service:

certbot certonly --standalone --pre-hook "net stop nginx" --post-hook "net start nginx"

or otherwise stop it by hand, and start it up again afterwards.

2 Likes
3

Thank you for the reply!

I tried your command and got the following:
C:\Certbot>certbot certonly --standalone --pre-hook “net stop nginx” --post-hook “net start nginx”
e[31mUnable to find pre-hook command net in the PATH.
(PATH is C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0;C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH;C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\Intel® Management Engine Components\DAL;C:\Program Files\Intel\Intel® Management Engine Components\DAL;C:\Program Files (x86)\Certbot\bin;C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps;C:\Program Files (x86)\Certbot\Python)e[0m

I’m pretty sure I should know what to do at this point, but as I said… I’m pretty much a noob at this point…

HOWEVER, i did stop manually stop nginx and tried “certbot certonly --standalone” with it stopped, but received the same error I got in the original post “… 404 Not found” etc. So i don’t think it was the fact that the service was turned on (or not just that fact alone)…

Any ideas on how to proceed next?

4

Hmm. Something here is suspicious. If nginx was stopped, you couldn't have gotten the 404 error containing the nginx version, right? As below:

Can you confirm that when you stop nginx, you can no longer access http://shin.go.ro ?

5

Nice catch there!

I did try and it did work, even though I did stop it. I had 2 more nginx processes running apparently. After I stopped those, it worked!

Thanks a lot for the help!

1 Like
6

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