Thank you for that, I may try certbot-auto, though in due course I will have a NodeJS based service running that will fill in for Apache. At that point I will use --webroot. This incident was born from the wish to manually fetch a certificate at the start of the deployment cycle, and I was surprised to encounter this deficiency in the current package version. It’s good news that 0.15.0 has resolved this, so all should come right in the near future. In the meantime, I will hunt for some certbot-auto guidance.
Once again, many thanks.