"don't know how to bootstrap Certbot on your OS"

Server
1

Hi,

I’m very inexperienced in this area.

I’m following the instructions here: https://certbot.eff.org/#pip-apache

My server is running Apache 2.4.16
The OS is listed (in my cPanel) as “Linux”

I connected via SSH and ran “wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto” and then “chmod a+x certbot-auto” and then finally “./certbot-auto”.

On the last command I got the error that says:

“sudo” is not available, will use “su” for installation steps…
Sorry, I don’t know how to bootstrap Certbot on your operating system!

You will need to bootstrap, configure virtualenv, and run pip install manually.
Please see https://letsencrypt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/contributing.html#prerequisites

I clicked the link it gave me however I didn’t see anything about what the above means or how to do it. Would appreciate any direction.

Cheers,
Kalyori

2

Hi Kalyori

Certbot tries to identify the flavour of linux you have and if it matches it it will install it.

Different flavors of linux have slightly different build scripts.

You can install certbot via python but there are a few things that you should do first

python --version

pip --version

those two should tell you what version of python and pip you have

you are likely to run into an issue installing the cryptography module so usually i try to knock this one out first

pip install cryptography

if you get messages about missing packages let us know what they are on here

if cryptography install with no issue then run

pip install certbot

Andrei

1 Like
3

Thanks for your help!

I ran the first two commands you mentioned.
Python is version 2.6.6.
PIP: “command not found”

So, I guess I need to install PIP first… what is it exactly?

4

hi @Kalyori

pip is a package management tool

you are running python 2.6 you may run in to trouble

so the first question is:

are you allowed to upgrade your python to 2.7 and if so this is something worthwhile considering

you can of course have multiple versions of python running (2.6 and 2.7) but you will need to alias them to avoid confusion

once you have pip you will be able to run pip install certbot

i would also suggest creating a virutal environment for your certbot so it doesn’t interfere with your normal python 2.6 and os related functions

if all of this sounds like french or martian let me know and i will do my best to assist :smiley:

Andrei

5

Ah I see.

So it’s worth upgrading to 2.7 if I can? Is this something that I should run by my host before doing or is it harmless? I would rather just have one version if possible as that seems simple.

A virtual environment for my certbot huh… that is a little martian to me :wink:
Is it like running a VM on Windows?

Will it cause problems if i don’t use a virtual environment?

Appreciate the help!

6

I’d think a much simpler answer would be to use one of the alternative clients like dehydrated or acme.sh. They won’t require installing any additional software (other than the scripts themselves), which keeps things quite a bit simpler. The possible downside is that you’ll have to manually make whatever configuration changes are necessary to implement the certificates, though you’d only need to do that once.

7

I see. Thanks for your reply.

I’ve had a look at acme.sh and it seems good. I think first I’ll try and install Certbot, and if that goes awry I’ll possibly turn to acme.sh.

Cheers

EDIT:
My host let me know they’ve installed Let’s Encrypt on the server, and said I should be able to try a direct certbot request for the SSL certificates. Does that mean I can skip installing Certbot?

8

Yep, you should be able to. If you can run certbot or certbot-auto, you’re good to go.

9

Hmmm… I get “command not found” when I type in “certbot” or “certbot-auto” so maybe it’s not installed?

10

Possibly. Or possibly it’s not in your PATH, so the shell can’t find it. Ask your host where they installed it?

11

Hmm. My host responded that they’d upgraded my site to SSL for me for no cost. I think they prefer I not use Let’s Encrypt for whatever reason. (They use AutoSSL.)

I still want to figure this out for future sites. I’ve been told I shouldn’t upgrade to Python 2.7, so I need to keep 2.6.6. Also I seem to have limited (“jailshell”) access to shell. Not sure if that affects whether or not I can install certbot.

The server is CentOS 7 on Cloud Linux.

12

Who told you not to upgrade to Python 2.7, and why? It’s broadly used for a long time now. Do you have applications that are only compatible with 2.6? If so, usually 2.6 and 2.7 can coexist on a system.

13

My host said that there was something depending on 2.6.6. Yeah, but I think setting up 2.6 and 2.7 on the same server is beyond me as I’m quite new to this.

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