Generating/renewing a Cert

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1

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. https://crt.sh/?q=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: www.lilbearcloud.com

I ran this command: certbot certonly (I assume, it's through the nextcloudpi web interface)

It produced this output:

[ letsencrypt ] (Sun Aug 3 17:14:28 UTC 2025)
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Requesting a certificate for www.lilbearcloud.com

Certbot failed to authenticate some domains (authenticator: webroot). The Certificate Authority reported these problems:
Domain: www.lilbearcloud.com
Type: unauthorized
Detail: 64.53.129.89: Invalid response from http://www.lilbearcloud.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/s9iFCtV2_yv3R4IFs8gxBxX0T-kcW2FbaAu2EBKtDd0: 400

Hint: The Certificate Authority failed to download the temporary challenge files created by Certbot. Ensure that the listed domains serve their content from the provided --webroot-path/-w and that files created there can be downloaded from the internet.

Some challenges have failed.
Ask for help or search for solutions at https://community.letsencrypt.org. See the logfile /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log or re-run Certbot with -v for more details.

My web server is (include version): Apache (I'm guessing again, I'm pretty sure nextcloud is apache)

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Armbian-unofficial 24.8.2 Bookworm \l . 6.6.45-current-bcm2711 (aarch64)

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: Self, Dynamic DNS through Namecheap

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): Yes

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you're using Certbot): Not sure

2

Your website is rejecting http requests while not redirecting the requests to https, the webserver needs to respond with a redirect (status code 3xx) to https.

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Got it. I've enabled "Forced HTTPS" in the nexclouppi web panel settings, but that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about.

Is there somewhere else I should check?

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Check for a <VirtualHost *:80> block with an SSLEngine on directive

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I'm not exactly sure what an SSLEngine directive is :sweat_smile:

Tried running it in the terminal and it told me that it wasn't a command.

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Also check any router's NAT or port forwarding to ensure incoming requests on port 80 are getting sent to the correct port for Apache (often also 80).

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7

Thank you to you both! Mike got it.

I went into my router's port forwarding settings. 80 and 443 were active on the external ports, but I set 443 for the Internal port for whatever reason (I think I thought it would help access the url locally). Deleting the internal port seems to have fixed it!

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