Is it possible to set renewal time

[run_the_race]

Is it possible to specify the time when certbot renews the certs?
At the moment I see it occurs at 00:00.

This is actually the first time for me, due to timezones the site is at its peak demand at 00:00, is it possible to specify what time it should renew the cert?

[schoen]

Hi @run_the_race,

Your certbot renew command is probably getting run by a cron job or a systemd timer, depending on how you installed Certbot. (However, 0:00 is an uncommon time for these tasks to run, so you may also have installed Certbot in a somewhat unusual way.)

Are you familiar with cron and systemd timers? Can you take a look at those to see how they're set up?

Alternatively, can you tell us how you installed Certbot?

[run_the_race]

Thanks for that info! I thought it might be a cron job, but couldnt see anything sounding like letsencrypt or certbot:

cron.d
├── e2scrub_all
├── popularity-contest
└── sysstat
cron.daily
├── apport
├── apt-compat
├── bsdmainutils
├── dpkg
├── logrotate
├── man-db
├── popularity-contest
├── sysstat
└── update-notifier-common
cron.hourly
cron.monthly
crontab [error opening dir]
cron.weekly
├── fstrim
├── man-db
└── update-notifier-common

I installed certbot with snap install --classic certbot on Ubuntu 20.04

[9peppe]

run systemctl list-timers

(and I find pretty strange that it always renews at midnight)

you can override the settings of that timer by running systemctl edit certbot.timer and then have fun setting OnCalendar and RandomizedDelaySec

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.timer.html

[_az]

When Certbot is installed as a snap, renewal times are randomly generated and set in the systemd unit.

You can inspect the generated times by looking at:

# grep OnCalendar /etc/systemd/system/snap.certbot.renew.timer
OnCalendar=*-*-* 02:48
OnCalendar=*-*-* 23:49

It seems unlikely that the times would be at midnight.

[schoen]

Try

systemctl list-timers

to see if it's run from a systemd timer.

Also note that traditional crontab files list jobs one per line in a text file, rather than using the cron.d method. You can normally view those with

crontab -l

as the user (e.g. root) whose crontab you're interested in.