SSL Cert Ended Looking to Learn How to Renew

Hi,

A friend of mine, very tech savvy, set up my SSL encryption for my shop last year using Let’s Encrypt. I’m not so tech savvy, and the cert seems to have expired, but I don’t know what to do to re-initialize the cert. From what I can gather, it must have been auto-renewing, but I’m not certain.

Ultimately I’m looking to learn how to do this rather than relying on friends as it seems like it should be an easy thing to manage on my own (this, of course, is an assumption).

My site is www.dungeoncrawler.com

I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’m not sure where or how to run the command line…

I believe I’m running Apache, but can’t seem to figure that out from my host, however I know I’m running Ubuntu.

Any help is appreciated!

Cheers, Jey.

A good starting point would be the official documentation. The certbot homepage includes an interactive instruction guide where you enter your OS and web server and get instructions that are specific to your environment. You’ll need to be familiar with ssh and the command line (at least the basics) to get this working. If you are indeed using apache, things are fairly simple and completely automated.

There’s a section on renewal in the documentation as well.

I have determined that I am running Apache, however, I have Ubuntu 14.04, and if I put those two in it says that it’s not automated.

When I go to my host, I do see a Console section where I can launch an Ajax console, what would I put in there for renewal?

Do I put this in? Where does it download to?

"Install
Since it doesn’t seem like your operating system has a packaged version of Certbot, you should use our certbot-auto script to get a copy:

wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
chmod a+x certbot-auto"

Ubuntu 14.04 does not have a packaged version of certbot, but the instructions on the page work on Ubuntu 14.04.

I'm not sure what you mean with this. Is this a SSH client for your server, provided by your host? That would work, but I would recommend using a local SSH client. That's something you need to get familiar with either way if you want to manage a web server - or really any kind of server.

If you're talking about some kind of control panel (like Plesk or cPanel), the instructions would be specific to that control panel and it would be hard to give you the exact commands to run, especially considering that you already have some kind of client for Let's Encrypt on it.

Those are the commands you run to install certbot. You can execute them via SSH; your home directory (which is where you land after connecting) would work, as would /opt or /usr/local/bin.

It's possible that your friend has already performed this step at some point, but it's hard to say where he might have put the script. Feel free to look around, but reinstalling should work just as well (the configuration won't be deleted).

@greyhaze. This tutorial may help you understand the SSH connection you’ll need and your host may have a similar tutorial. Try their help section rather than your cPanel to start. http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/ssh/shared-reseller-ssh
My host requires they install the certificate so I wasn’t able to use LE services, but I’m looking into hosting elsewhere when my contract ends.
Since your friend already set LE up before, you’ve got a great head start!

Thank you, I’ll contact my host and see if they can reset it. :slight_smile:

The host says I have root access and can do it myself, then referred me back to the install page here.

@greyhaze, you need to figure out how to take advantage of that root access. It’s probably via the remote-login protocol SSH (which requires an SSH client application on your computer; on Linux or Mac OS X you can run ssh in a terminal to do this, while on Windows you need to install something like PuTTY). It’s possible that the “Ajax terminal” that you mentioned above is an alternative to this.

When you log successfully, you should see a command-line prompt ending in $ or # and asking you to type in a command. This is probably part of what your friend did when originally setting up your cert.

You may need to ask your hosting provider more about how to log in to the root access that you have.

Got it fixed. Had to get my friend’s help, but I do have a better understanding of it now. Send that an update was also needed that was tripping me up. Thanks for the help guys. Hoping I can handle it on my own next time. :slight_smile: