Crontab renew fails

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1

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My domain is: arcath.net

I ran this command:

/opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto renew >> /var/log/le-renew.log

In roots crontab file

It produced this output:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/arcath.net.conf
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:
  /etc/letsencrypt/live/arcath.net/fullchain.pem (failure)

My operating system is (include version): debian 8

My web server is (include version): apache 2.4.10

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: n/a

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

When I run the same command from sudo it works no problem. Why would the root contab (sudo crontab -e) be unable to renew my certs?

This is happening on all the servers I manage not just the one hosting arcath.net

2

Take a look at your log files in /var/log/letsencrypt, there might be additional clues somewhere in there.

3

From the logs I get:

2016-10-03 01:30:02,398:WARNING:certbot.renewal:Attempting to renew cert from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/arcath.net.conf produced an unexpected error: The apache plugin is not working; there may be problems with your existing configuration.
The error was: NoInstallationError(). Skipping.
2016-10-03 01:30:02,398:DEBUG:certbot.renewal:Traceback was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/certbot/renewal.py", line 346, in renew_all_lineages
    main.obtain_cert(lineage_config, plugins, renewal_candidate)
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/certbot/main.py", line 546, in obtain_cert
    installer, auth = plug_sel.choose_configurator_plugins(config, plugins, "certonly")
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/certbot/plugins/selection.py", line 196, in choose_configurator_plugins
    diagnose_configurator_problem("authenticator", req_auth, plugins)
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/certbot/plugins/selection.py", line 273, in diagnose_configurator_problem
    raise errors.PluginSelectionError(msg)
PluginSelectionError: The apache plugin is not working; there may be problems with your existing configuration.
The error was: NoInstallationError()
4

This is probably due to your $PATH variable having a different value in your cron environment, this post mentions one possible workaround:

5

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