Renew_before_expiry variable

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Hello All,

I did not set the renew_before_expiry = 30 days in the renewal conf file , It was commented out . I guessed the default renewal should have been 30 days before the cert expires . However , all the certs which are expiring this August 2025 are already renewed by the certbot this April which is almost 3-4 months in advance . I do not remember setting any renewal period during the cert install . May I know the exact reason this happened and can I just change the renew_before_expiry to 30 days without any server reboot or restart of anything?

Thank you

2

There was a change in Certbot v4.0 which changed the default renewal period.

See: certbot/certbot/CHANGELOG.md at main · certbot/certbot · GitHub

Certificates now renew with 1/3rd of lifetime left (or 1/2 of lifetime left, if the lifetime is shorter than 10 days). This is a change from a hardcoded renewal at 30 days before expiration. The config field renew_before_expiry still overrides this default.

Those wouldn't have been Let's Encrypt certs - were they? Because LE certs expire after 90 days and only recent ones would expire in Aug.

Were those certs from some other CA that lasted 1 year? Because 4 months advance renewal seems right for that based on Certbot's new default.

You should be able to change the Certbot renewal setting as described in the release notes.

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Thank you Mike, yes its from a different CA (Incommon) . I was only wondering if this 4 months early renewal something in the certbot config that I should look into .

Thank you