Renewal attempts failed, obtaining failed unless nginx restart

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1

My domain is: www.code4com.com

I ran this command: sudo certbot renew --cert-name www.code4com.com

It produced this output:

Challenge failed for domain www.code4com.com
Attempting to renew cert (www.code4com.com) from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/www.code4com.com.conf produced an unexpected error: Some challenges have failed.. Skipping.
All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:
  /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.code4com.com/fullchain.pem (failure)

My web server is (include version): nginx/1.20.2

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: it's a dedicated server

I can login to a root shell on my machine: yes

I'm using a control panel to manage my site: no

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you're using Certbot): 0.40.0

Since a couple of months I started to have problems obtaining and verifying new certificates on this server. The problem was that was impossibile to have the temporary well-known directive loaded by nginx and the challenges always failed.
I solved with a simple workaround using
--debug-challenges -v
directive and, using another terminal, restarting nginx before confirm to check for the .well-known nginx config to be created. nginx reload was not enough.

I think now I have the very same problem but on renewal process...can I use a sort of --debug-challanges on renewal to restart nginx just before the challenge?

Or do you have any advice on how to solve the problem at the source? When I had less domains I was able to renew certificates and to obtains new one simply using

sudo certbot --nginx --non-interactive --redirect -d "URL"

but when the number of domains increased I started to have to restart nginx in the middle of obtaining process, and looks like I now have the same on renewal process.

2

This is almost certainly a case of nginx not reloading quickly enough for Certbot's tastes.

We added an --nginx-sleep-seconds parameter to Certbot in version v1.7.0 which allows you to increase the duration for which Certbot will wait for nginx to finish reloading. I highly recommend upgrading Certbot and using that flag.

You can use the snap or pip instructions to get a newer Certbot on Ubuntu 20.04.

You could also upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04, where the apt package for Certbot is v1.21.0.

3

Thanks for your suggestion.
Waiting to update safely certbot version using snap on production server, is there any chance to use something like --debug-challenges on renewal process? So that I can restart nginx during the process and keep the renewal process waiting longer?

4

I don’t think there’s a way to do what you want, sorry. We added the flag because there was no workaround (other than changing authenticator).