Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. https://crt.sh/?q=example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.
I ran this command:
sudo certbot renew --nginx
It produced this output:
Could not choose appropriate plugin: The requested nginx plugin does not appear to be installed
My web server is (include version):
The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):
ubuntu
My hosting provider, if applicable, is:
I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don’t know):
I’m using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel):
The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you’re using Certbot):
No, it wasn’t installed but I installed it now sudo certbot renew --nginx returns this error
None of the preferred challenges are supported by the selected plugin. Skipping.
All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:
I didn’t pass in preferred-challenges because my understanding was that it’s only for use with the --manual option and also since I’m using wildcard domains I’m forced to use the default challenge dns01
Since the nginx plugin doesn't support DNS validation, you can't use it to get a wildcard certificate.
You could probably use -i nginx to install a wildcard certificate, though.
There isn't currently a difference between "dns" and "dns-01". If a DNS-02 challenge type is ever invented, maybe the Certbot developers would change the meaning of "dns", but they're equivalent now.
Your domain is currently using Namecheap's DNS service. It can be automated with an API, but it's not available to all customers, and Certbot doesn't include support for it. (At least one other ACME client does.)