Certbot no module named certbot

Help
1

I'm running certbot on my development machine for testing.
I've had it install for some time and it normally works fine.

Today (after not using it from some weeks/months) it is broken.

When I run the certbot command it produces:

certbot
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/XXXX/.local/bin/certbot", line 5, in <module>
    from certbot.main import main
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'certbot'

If I run dwhich I find several copies of certbot on my path:

Found at: /home/XXX/.local/bin/certbot
Found at: /usr/bin/certbot
Found at: /bin/certbot

I'm not a python guy and I don't recall how I installed certbot except to say the 'apt' version didn't work (and isn't installed) as its on like version 0.4 and I have a feeling I had todo something with python profiles(?).

What is the recommended way to install certbot on ubuntu and how do I remove these bad versions?

OS:
Linux 5.15.0-41-generic #44-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jun 22 14:20:53 UTC 2022

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don't know): yes

2

Probably installed via pip install --user certbot.

Are probably the versions you got from apt.

Install it either via the snap or using a Python virtual environment.

apt remove certbot
pip uninstall certbot
rm -f ~USER/.local/bin/certbot
3 Likes
3

Thanks for the response.
After following your removal instructions:

apt remove certbot
pip uninstall certbot
rm -f ~USER/.local/bin/certbot

I was still left with

dwhich certbot
Found at: /usr/bin/certbot
Found at: /bin/certbot

And the error persisted.

Is it safe to just delete each of these certbot instances?

1 Like
4

I renamed the spurious certbot commands and then ran the snap install.

Certbot is now working.

So thanks for the help!

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5

Those are (were) probably symbolic links to other resources, which you can check using the ls -l command. You should be able to check this for the now-renamed certbot objects. If those are indeed symlinks to resources that are now removed due to your previous uninstall commands, you can also safely remove those now-defunct, renamed symlinks. If they're not symlinks, well, that's another story then.

3 Likes
6

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