Hi.
I usually have a cronjob running on my VPS to renew my certificate and a week or so ago, I got an email from my server warning me my certificate was going to expire. So I logged into my server to check the issue, running the renew command I got this error:
Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing...
Could not choose appropriate plugin: The apache plugin is not working; there may be problems with your existing configuration.
The error was: PluginError('There has been an error in parsing the file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/default-ssl on line 97: Syntax error',)
Attempting to renew cert (example.net) from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/example.net.conf produced an unexpected error: The apache plugin is not working; there may be problems with your existing configuration.
The error was: PluginError('There has been an error in parsing the file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/default-ssl on line 97: Syntax error',). Skipping.
All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.net/fullchain.pem (failure)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
** DRY RUN: simulating 'certbot renew' close to cert expiry
** (The test certificates below have not been saved.)
All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.net/fullchain.pem (failure)
** DRY RUN: simulating 'certbot renew' close to cert expiry
** (The test certificates above have not been saved.)
Here is my CONF file:
<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
<VirtualHost _default_:443>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName example.net:443
DocumentRoot /var/www
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/ssl_access.log combined
Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>
# SSL Engine Switch:
# Enable/Disable SSL for this virtual host.
SSLEngine on
# A self-signed (snakeoil) certificate can be created by installing
# the ssl-cert package. See
# /usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/README.Debian.gz for more info.
# If both key and certificate are stored in the same file, only the
# SSLCertificateFile directive is needed.
# Server Certificate Chain:
# Point SSLCertificateChainFile at a file containing the
# concatenation of PEM encoded CA certificates which form the
# certificate chain for the server certificate. Alternatively
# the referenced file can be the same as SSLCertificateFile
# when the CA certificates are directly appended to the server
# certificate for convinience.
#SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/server-ca.crt
# Certificate Authority (CA):
# Set the CA certificate verification path where to find CA
# certificates for client authentication or alternatively one
# huge file containing all of them (file must be PEM encoded)
# Note: Inside SSLCACertificatePath you need hash symlinks
# to point to the certificate files. Use the provided
# Makefile to update the hash symlinks after changes.
#SSLCACertificatePath /etc/ssl/certs/
#SSLCACertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/ca-bundle.crt
# Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL):
# Set the CA revocation path where to find CA CRLs for client
# authentication or alternatively one huge file containing all
# of them (file must be PEM encoded)
# Note: Inside SSLCARevocationPath you need hash symlinks
# to point to the certificate files. Use the provided
# Makefile to update the hash symlinks after changes.
#SSLCARevocationPath /etc/apache2/ssl.crl/
#SSLCARevocationFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crl/ca-bundle.crl
# Client Authentication (Type):
# Client certificate verification type and depth. Types are
# none, optional, require and optional_no_ca. Depth is a
# number which specifies how deeply to verify the certificate
# issuer chain before deciding the certificate is not valid.
#SSLVerifyClient require
#SSLVerifyDepth 10
# Access Control:
# With SSLRequire you can do per-directory access control based
# on arbitrary complex boolean expressions containing server
# variable checks and other lookup directives. The syntax is a
# mixture between C and Perl. See the mod_ssl documentation
# for more details.
#<Location />
#SSLRequire ( %{SSL_CIPHER} !~ m/^(EXP|NULL)/ \
# and %{SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_O} eq "Snake Oil, Ltd." \
# and %{SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_OU} in {"Staff", "CA", "Dev"} \
# and %{TIME_WDAY} >= 1 and %{TIME_WDAY} <= 5 \
# and %{TIME_HOUR} >= 8 and %{TIME_HOUR} <= 20 ) \
# or %{REMOTE_ADDR} =~ m/^192\.76\.162\.[0-9]+$/
#</Location>
# SSL Engine Options:
# Set various options for the SSL engine.
# o FakeBasicAuth:
# Translate the client X.509 into a Basic Authorisation. This means that
# the standard Auth/DBMAuth methods can be used for access control. The
# user name is the `one line' version of the client's X.509 certific ate.
# Note that no password is obtained from the user. Every entry in th e user
# file needs this password: `xxj31ZMTZzkVA'.
# o ExportCertData:
# This exports two additional environment variables: SSL_CLIENT_CERT and
# SSL_SERVER_CERT. These contain the PEM-encoded certificates of the
# server (always existing) and the client (only existing when client
# authentication is used). This can be used to import the certificat es
# into CGI scripts.
# o StdEnvVars:
# This exports the standard SSL/TLS related `SSL_*' environment vari ables.
# Per default this exportation is switched off for performance reaso ns,
# because the extraction step is an expensive operation and is usual ly
# useless for serving static content. So one usually enables the
# exportation for CGI and SSI requests only.
# o StrictRequire:
# This denies access when "SSLRequireSSL" or "SSLRequire" applied ev en
# under a "Satisfy any" situation, i.e. when it applies access is de nied
# and no other module can change it.
# o OptRenegotiate:
# This enables optimized SSL connection renegotiation handling when SSL
# directives are used in per-directory context.
#SSLOptions +FakeBasicAuth +ExportCertData +StrictRequire
<FilesMatch "\.(cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$">
SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
</FilesMatch>
<Directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin>
SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
</Directory>
# SSL Protocol Adjustments:
# The safe and default but still SSL/TLS standard compliant shutdown
# approach is that mod_ssl sends the close notify alert but doesn't wa it for
# the close notify alert from client. When you need a different shutdo wn
# approach you can use one of the following variables:
# o ssl-unclean-shutdown:
# This forces an unclean shutdown when the connection is closed, i.e . no
# SSL close notify alert is send or allowed to received. This viola tes
# the SSL/TLS standard but is needed for some brain-dead browsers. U se
# this when you receive I/O errors because of the standard approach where
# mod_ssl sends the close notify alert.
# o ssl-accurate-shutdown:
# This forces an accurate shutdown when the connection is closed, i. e. a
# SSL close notify alert is send and mod_ssl waits for the close not ify
# alert of the client. This is 100% SSL/TLS standard compliant, but in
# practice often causes hanging connections with brain-dead browsers . Use
# this only for browsers where you know that their SSL implementatio n
# works correctly.
# Notice: Most problems of broken clients are also related to the HTTP
# keep-alive facility, so you usually additionally want to disable
# keep-alive for those clients, too. Use variable "nokeepalive" for th is.
# Similarly, one has to force some clients to use HTTP/1.0 to workarou nd
# their broken HTTP/1.1 implementation. Use variables "downgrade-1.0" and
# "force-response-1.0" for this.
BrowserMatch "MSIE [2-6]" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
# MSIE 7 and newer should be able to use keepalive
BrowserMatch "MSIE [17-9]" ssl-unclean-shutdown
ServerAlias example.net
SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.net/cert.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.net/privkey.pem
Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.net/chain.pem
</VirtualHost>
</IfModule>
Thanks guys, Merry Christmas!