[solved] Another instance of Certbot is already running

I need help with the problem of output “Another instance of Certbot is already running”

The power accidentally turned off while Certbot was running certificate renewal. Now I can’t continue with the renew certificate because Let’s Encrypt Certbot indicates “Another instance of Certbot is already running”.

Thanks

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You need to kill the other certbot process.
You can do that by rebooting the box.
Or by killing the specific process.
To find the certbot process, try:
ps -ef | grep certb
The process ID would be the first number after the user, like:
root 5555 5100 …
To kill the process, try:
kill 5555
((replace 5555 with your actual certbot PID#))

8 Likes

Hi @bv1,

As @rg305 said, first you need to be sure that there isn’t another instance of certbot running but as you said your server reboot unexpectedly during the renewal process… maybe certbot is not running but it left some .certbot.lock files behind.

If it is not running, check whether there are .certbot.lock files in your system.

find / -type f -name ".certbot.lock"

If there are, you can remove them:

find / -type f -name ".certbot.lock" -exec rm {} \;

And try again.

Cheers,
sahsanu

12 Likes

It’s done. Thanks rg305. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

Hi Sahsanu. Thank you. It’s done.:slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

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