Back before there was an official Ubuntu package for letsencrypt, I installed certbot manually by cloning from github into $HOME/letsencrypt. That’s been working well for me but I’d like to clean things up a bit and use the Ubuntu package.
Since the LE client ends up storing all its stuff in /etc/letsencrypt anyway, is it safe to simply start running the version in /usr/bin instead of in $HOME/letsencrypt, or is there some configuration I need to migrate first? I notice the .gitignore covers a lot of stuff that looks like it could be local configuration, but I don’t see anything floating around offhand that is an obvious problem, and it looks like all of my local configuration is stored properly in /etc/letsencrypt/accounts.
Still, I’d like to be sure I’m not about to cause any problems by running the version in /usr/bin, so are there any spot checks I should try to make sure that everything is fine?
Unfortunately, the client package in Ubuntu 16.04 is a bit outdated and tends to have compatibility issues with renewal config files generated by more recent versions of the client (which you’re probably using, since the letsencrypt-auto/certbot-auto scripts are self-updating).
Sticking with the -auto script or starting with an empty /etc/letsencrypt directory (which would involve re-issuing all existing certificates) would be the easiest options. It would probably be possible to edit the config files manually to make them compatible with the Ubuntu package, but you’d have to go with a trial-and-error approach, as I don’t think the incompatibilities are documented anywhere.