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: mountaintrips.com
I ran this command: sudo apt install certbot
It produced this output: N/A
My web server is (include version): manual mode
The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): ubuntu 18.04
My hosting provider, if applicable, is: N/A
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): No
The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you’re using Certbot): 1.0.0.0
When you install Certbot, it seems only the basic file structure is created. /etc/letsencrypt and /var/log/letsencrypt, etc…
When you run it for the first time, the additional required file structure for LE is created /letsencrypt/renewal, live, renewal-hooks, etc…
But if you are using --manual mode, and are going to specify custom authentication, deploy, and cleanup scripts, is there a way to initialize Certbot without having to run it once with --standalone --dry-run to let it fail and create the structure? Or do I have to create this structure manually and assign the correct permissions?