Need Help Restoring Website

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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. crt.sh | 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:

I ran this command:

sudo certbot delete
sudo apt purge python-certbot-apache
sudo a2dissite 000-default-le-ssl.conf
sudo rm -rf /etc/letsencrypt/
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/letsencrypt/
sudo rm -rf /var/log/letsencrypt/
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt autoremove

It produced this output:
ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR on the website.
My web server is (include version):
Apache 2.4.52
The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):
Ubuntu 22.04.4
My hosting provider, if applicable, is:
AWS
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):
Certbox 2.10.0

2

Your certificates were stored under /etc/letsencrypt/live and so now your Apache config references files that don't exist. I would suggest restoring from backup, or remove SSL configuration settings from each website configuration then set them up again. If you don't have a backup then this is an example of why they're a good idea.

I'm not an Apache expert but one strategy is to learn by reading and editing the apache config, googling the docs as you go, that way you can unpick the problem yourself.

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I see. So does this mean that the previous encryption that allowed users on my website which was just HTTP configuration without any SSL certificates, is now gone? Welp, it looks like I will be reading the config to figure out how to reset it back to the default configuration I had before.

4

The http confguration is there, but so is the https configuration, so your current problem is apache thinks it should have certificates that aren't present on disk anymore but it's still trying to us them.

I would guess that your apache config is currently trying to redirect http to https, so you can fix that if you want to first by looking for the RewriteRule in your apache conf. I think certbot creates a file sites-available/000-default-le-ssl.conf that performs that function. Additionally I believe certbot will have added an le-ssl.conf file for each site containing the ssl config. You may want to wait for help from an apache/certbot expert, or you can try and fix stuff yourself. I'm very much an advocate for understanding your own config so that you are empowered to fix problems if they come up.

[For anyone trying to remove certbot, this is the source of the original instructions which didn't include instructions on removing SSL config: letsencrypt - How to completely remove "certbot" from ubuntu? - Ask Ubuntu]

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5

Why did you run those precarious commands to begin with?

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I found the same forum and it seemed like I could remove certbot, which I planned to do, so I could also remove the SSL config but I just failed to read into what I was actually doing. I had to reinstall apache2 back to default configs and redo the entire setup but it's up and running now so cheers.

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