Download existing cert's without renewing?

I've been trying to get some services, including swag, running in docker and after some headaches and "wiping" away the work I've done to try and start from scratch with what I've learned and have run into the dreaded,

Error creating new order :: too many certificates (5) already issued for this exact set of domains in the last 168 hours

I'm wondering is if it's possible to just "download" the certificates with certbot setting up the files and links without renewing the certificates?

thanks!

1 Like

Hello @tincanfury welcome to the Let's Encrypt community. :slightly_smiling_face:

Please see Rate Limits - Let's Encrypt; also testing and debugging are best done using the Staging Environment

Certificates can be retrieved, as an example here is the Certificate for community.letsencrypt.org
https://search.censys.io/certificates/21a9af50f9ab4ecd2180ef203448c2207bca5379be2bcf656ad48e3d9cc00beb/pem
However the Private Key is not Publicly available anywhere (at least is shouldn't be if your security is correct). So you must keep at least the Private Key between "wiping"; but if you are keeping that why not just keep the Certificate as well.

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. crt.sh | example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.

My domain is:

I ran this command:

It produced this output:

My web server is (include version):

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):

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):

Thank you for assisting us in helping YOU!

3 Likes

"dreaded"?
It is there to stop runaway renewals.
Otherwise, your process may have issued a hundred times as many.
You need to fix the process.
AND
While you are testing (before making it to production), you need to use the testing/staging environment.

hmm...
That might be an option.
You would need to better describe the exact scenario before any relevant advice can be given.

5 Likes

I think this could be resolved with a good BACKUP strategy.
My 2 cents.
:coin: :coin:

4 Likes

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