# How can I create a second account? Can certbot-auto eveb handle multiple accounts?

**URL:** <https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-can-i-create-a-second-account-can-certbot-auto-eveb-handle-multiple-accounts/23647>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [December 5, 2016, 11:22pm UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-can-i-create-a-second-account-can-certbot-auto-eveb-handle-multiple-accounts/23647 "2016-12-05T23:22:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jvanasco](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/letsencrypt/user_avatar/community.letsencrypt.org/jvanasco/32/55900_2.png) [@jvanasco](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/jvanasco)\
**Post date:** [December 5, 2016, 11:22pm UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-can-i-create-a-second-account-can-certbot-auto-eveb-handle-multiple-accounts/23647/1 "2016-12-05T23:22:57Z")

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This is a 2 part question…

Background: I have an account and have been a happy user for over a year. Some of my domains are handled by certbot-auto; some are handled by a custom certificate manager. I am at the point where I need to create one or two additional accounts to manage a portfolio of domain names. The tldr; is that my “personal” information is associated with the current account, and I need to partition/isolate some existing+new domains into two new “professional” portfolios that will have different sets of owners/managers/contacts.

The certbot-auto command won’t let me register a second account on the existing server. I get the following notice:

```
There is an existing account; registration of a duplicate account with this command is currently unsupported

```

I could use the ACME API to generate new accounts manually, but I don’t know how/if any of those accounts could be registered with `/etc/letsencrypt/...` config, or if certbot-auto could even support that.

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**Author:** ![pfg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/letsencrypt/user_avatar/community.letsencrypt.org/pfg/32/1924_2.png) [@pfg](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/pfg)\
**Post date:** [December 5, 2016, 11:31pm UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-can-i-create-a-second-account-can-certbot-auto-eveb-handle-multiple-accounts/23647/2 "2016-12-05T23:31:40Z")

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I don’t have access to a `certbot` installation right now, but one thing you could try is running `certbot register` with an empty account directory (either by running it on a separate server, temporarily moving `/etc/letsencrypt` somewhere else, or using a different value for `--config-dir`), and then merging both account directories.

You’d have to add `--account <account-id>` to any command you run after that. (The account ID is just the name of the corresponding subdirectory in the accounts directory, IIRC.)

(Thinking about this some more, maybe using separate `--config-dir`s in general would be a good enough approach for the kind of isolation you’re looking for.)

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**Author:** ![jvanasco](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/letsencrypt/user_avatar/community.letsencrypt.org/jvanasco/32/55900_2.png) [@jvanasco](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/jvanasco)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2016, 12:15am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-can-i-create-a-second-account-can-certbot-auto-eveb-handle-multiple-accounts/23647/3 "2016-12-06T00:15:12Z")

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multiple config-dirs would most definitely work. I could probably manually edit everything to let them switch account keys for renewal too.

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**Author:** ![jvanasco](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/letsencrypt/user_avatar/community.letsencrypt.org/jvanasco/32/55900_2.png) [@jvanasco](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/jvanasco)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2016, 12:40am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-can-i-create-a-second-account-can-certbot-auto-eveb-handle-multiple-accounts/23647/4 "2016-12-06T00:40:19Z")

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I found something that works well-enough for now:

```
mv /etc/letsencrypt/accounts /etc/letsencrypt/accounts.off
./certbot-auto register
mv /etc/letsencrypt/accounts.off/acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory/* /etc/letsencrypt/accounts.off/acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory/

```

then I can invoke certbot-auto with the correct account id:

```
./certbot-auto certonly --standalone --account=fullHexId
```

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**Author:** ![system](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/letsencrypt/original/3X/c/a/ca6c06ea1ea201324bba7048c6841ce60236468d.png) [@system](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/system)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2017, 12:40am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-can-i-create-a-second-account-can-certbot-auto-eveb-handle-multiple-accounts/23647/5 "2017-01-05T00:40:31Z")

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