Nice!
I was actually googling for a status of certbot on epel release and did not manage to find anything.
That link is great.
Gives all the info one needs.
| Dates | - |
|---|---|
| submitted | 10 days ago |
| in testing | 9 days ago |
| days to stable | 5 |
so 5 days to wait 
Thanks from me
I am seeing this same issue on my Ubuntu server which according to my apt is up to date.
dpkg -l certbot python-certbot python3-certbot
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
++±=============================================-===========================-===========================-===============================================================================================
ii certbot 0.23.0-1 all automatically configure HTTPS using Let’s Encrypt
ii python3-certbot 0.23.0-1 all main library for certbot
dpkg-query: no packages found matching python-certbot
Cert not due for renewal, but simulating renewal for dry run
Plugins selected: Authenticator webroot, Installer None
Renewing an existing certificate
Attempting to renew cert (public..oh.us) from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/public..oh.us.conf produced an unexpected error: Deserialization error: Could not decode ‘status’ (‘ready’): Deserialization error: Status not recognized. Skipping.
I see that there was a number of updates for the apache server. Is there an update that is stuck in limbo for the Ubuntu distro?
I don't know if Ubuntu's packages are going to be updated, but you can use the Certbot PPA to get a newer version.
https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/ubuntuartful-apache
(Those instructions are for Artful, but Bionic is the same.)
mnorfhoff
I tried your suggestion. Initially, it did not help. But I decided to try to uninstall the old packages and reinstall. With the new packages install the issue was resolved.
Thanks,