Issue generating a certificate: The requested apache plugin does not appear to be installed

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My domain is: lester.irishman.xyz

I ran this command: sudo certbot certonly --apache

It produced this output: Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Could not choose appropriate plugin: The requested apache plugin does not appear to be installed
The requested apache plugin does not appear to be installed

My web server is (include version): Apache 2.4.29 and nginx 1.14 (Ubuntu)

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):
Ubunto 18.04.5 Bionic

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: None

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): 0.31.0

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I did have a SSL certificate already, but then it expired after I installed nginx alongside Apache 2

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It looks like your website is served by Nginx rather than Apache. Can you try to use --nginx instead?
You might also need to install certbot's nginx plugin if you haven't done so. How did you install certbot on this machine?

Thank you

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Welcome to the Let's Encrypt Community :slightly_smiling_face:

Your version of certbot is rather old (0.31.0 vs 1.9.0).
You might consider updating to the snap version.

https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/ubuntubionic-nginx

You have both apache and nginx webservers configured?

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Not 100% sure about nginx as it was installed when I was following this: https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/ubuntu-18-04-iredmail-email-server

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I installed it with sudo snap install --classic certbot

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You probably have multiple versions of certbot installed. One of the steps when installing the snap version is to remove all other versions of certbot:

If you have any Certbot packages installed using an OS package manager like apt, dnf, or yum, you should remove them before installing the Certbot snap to ensure that when you run the command certbot the snap is used rather than the installation from your OS package manager. The exact command to do this depends on your OS, but common examples are sudo apt-get remove certbot, sudo dnf remove certbot, or sudo yum remove certbot.

What is the output of:
sudo certbot --version

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I actually got it working by changing my sever_name to lester.irishman.xyz and installing the nginx extension

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I'm very happy you got this working!

:partying_face:

Something still troubles me though...

If you were actually using snap certbot version 1.9, I don't think you would have needed to install the nginx extension.

This really old version:

has never been available via snap, which is what leads me to believe that you have multiple versions of certbot installed.

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I don't know why I still have the old version. Could snap be out of date?

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Not that out of date. That version (0.31.0) predates certbot snap installation. I'm guessing you just didn't uninstall the previous version(s) before installing the snap version.

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