# SSLCertificateFile: file '/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/cert.pem' does not exist or is empty **URL:** \ **Category:** Help\ **Created:** [December 6, 2016, 8:22am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/sslcertificatefile-file-etc-letsencrypt-live-example-com-cert-pem-does-not-exist-or-is-empty/23665 "2016-12-06T08:22:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![visualight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/a183cd/32.png) [@visualight](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/visualight)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2016, 8:22am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/sslcertificatefile-file-etc-letsencrypt-live-example-com-cert-pem-does-not-exist-or-is-empty/23665/1 "2016-12-06T08:22:01Z")
Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. My domain is: [example.com](http://example.com) I ran this command: service apache2 reload It produced this output: - The apache2 configtest failed. Not doing anything. Output of config test was: AH00526: Syntax error on line 22 of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/example.com-le-ssl.conf: SSLCertificateFile: file ‘/etc/letsencrypt/live/joliefanny.com/cert.pem’ does not exist or is empty Action ‘configtest’ failed. (my apache2 error.log is empty) My operating system is (include version): Ubuntu 14.04 My web server is (include version): Apache 2.4.7 My hosting provider, if applicable, is: Amazon 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 ---
**Author:** ![serverco](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/letsencrypt/user_avatar/community.letsencrypt.org/serverco/32/4251_2.png) [@serverco](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/serverco)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2016, 8:40am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/sslcertificatefile-file-etc-letsencrypt-live-example-com-cert-pem-does-not-exist-or-is-empty/23665/2 "2016-12-06T08:40:15Z")
I assume before you ran the “service apache2 reload” command you ran a certbot command of some sort to obtain a certificate. Can you provide that command, and the result it gave ? ---
**Author:** ![visualight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/a183cd/32.png) [@visualight](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/visualight)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2016, 8:49am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/sslcertificatefile-file-etc-letsencrypt-live-example-com-cert-pem-does-not-exist-or-is-empty/23665/3 "2016-12-06T08:49:28Z")
COMMAND : /usr/local/sbin$ ./certbot-auto --apache Requesting root privileges to run certbot… /home/ubuntu/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/letsencrypt --apache Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log Then I select : [joliefanny.com](http://joliefanny.com) and [www.joliefanny.com](http://www.joliefanny.com) in the blue box. The certbot ran without errors and then : - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at /etc/letsencrypt/live/joliefanny.com/fullchain.pem. Your cert will expire on 2017-03-06. To obtain a new or tweaked version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot-auto again with the "certonly" option. To non-interactively renew _all_ of your certificates, run “certbot-auto renew” ---
**Author:** ![serverco](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/letsencrypt/user_avatar/community.letsencrypt.org/serverco/32/4251_2.png) [@serverco](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/serverco)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2016, 8:52am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/sslcertificatefile-file-etc-letsencrypt-live-example-com-cert-pem-does-not-exist-or-is-empty/23665/4 "2016-12-06T08:52:27Z")
Can you do a full directory listing in /etc/letsencrypt/live/joliefanny.com/ please ( ls -l … so it includes all files and sizes ) ---
**Author:** ![visualight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/a183cd/32.png) [@visualight](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/visualight)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2016, 8:57am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/sslcertificatefile-file-etc-letsencrypt-live-example-com-cert-pem-does-not-exist-or-is-empty/23665/5 "2016-12-06T08:57:40Z")
Here is apache2 error.log : [Tue Dec 06 09:08:59.250240 2016] [ssl:warn] [pid 1574] AH01906: RSA server certificate is a CA certificate (BasicConstraints: CA == TRUE !?) [Tue Dec 06 09:08:59.250499 2016] [ssl:warn] [pid 1574] AH01906: RSA server certificate is a CA certificate (BasicConstraints: CA == TRUE !?) [Tue Dec 06 09:08:59.251326 2016] [ssl:warn] [pid 1574] AH02292: Init: Name-based SSL virtual hosts only work for clients with TLS server name indication support (RFC 4366) [Tue Dec 06 09:08:59.251381 2016] [mpm\_prefork:notice] [pid 1574] AH00163: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.5.9-1ubuntu4.20 OpenSSL/1.0.1f configured – resuming normal operations [Tue Dec 06 09:08:59.251388 2016] [core:notice] [pid 1574] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/sbin/apache2’ [Tue Dec 06 09:09:05.947595 2016] [mpm\_prefork:notice] [pid 1574] AH00171: Graceful restart requested, doing restart Here is the listing of the directory : root@ip-172-31-19-213:/etc/letsencrypt/live/joliefanny.com# ls -l total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 38 Dec 6 09:09 cert.pem -\> …/…/archive/joliefanny.com/cert4.pem lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Dec 6 09:09 chain.pem -\> …/…/archive/joliefanny.com/chain4.pem lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 43 Dec 6 09:09 fullchain.pem -\> …/…/archive/joliefanny.com/fullchain4.pem lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 41 Dec 6 09:09 privkey.pem -\> …/…/archive/joliefanny.com/privkey4.pem ---
**Author:** ![serverco](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/letsencrypt/user_avatar/community.letsencrypt.org/serverco/32/4251_2.png) [@serverco](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/serverco)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2016, 9:01am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/sslcertificatefile-file-etc-letsencrypt-live-example-com-cert-pem-does-not-exist-or-is-empty/23665/6 "2016-12-06T09:01:30Z")
What is the content of cert.pem (or the file it links to, cert4.pem) ? ( note: the privkey.pem needs to be kept private, but the cert.pem is OK to provide ) ---
**Author:** ![visualight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/a183cd/32.png) [@visualight](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/visualight)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2016, 9:06am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/sslcertificatefile-file-etc-letsencrypt-live-example-com-cert-pem-does-not-exist-or-is-empty/23665/7 "2016-12-06T09:06:51Z")
Here is the listing of letsencrypt directory : root@ip-172-31-19-213:/etc/letsencrypt# ls -l total 28 drwx------ 3 root root 4096 Aug 14 01:02 accounts drwx------ 3 root root 4096 Aug 14 01:03 archive drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 6 09:09 csr drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Dec 6 09:09 keys drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Aug 14 01:03 live -rw-r–r-- 1 root root 1389 Aug 14 01:02 options-ssl-apache.conf drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 6 09:09 renewal Archive directory have not the same permissions of live directory. I apply chmod 755 to archive and it work 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![serverco](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/letsencrypt/user_avatar/community.letsencrypt.org/serverco/32/4251_2.png) [@serverco](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/serverco)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2016, 9:18am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/sslcertificatefile-file-etc-letsencrypt-live-example-com-cert-pem-does-not-exist-or-is-empty/23665/8 "2016-12-06T09:18:44Z")
Check the permissions of your private key though - that shouldn’t have world read permissions. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/letsencrypt/original/3X/c/a/ca6c06ea1ea201324bba7048c6841ce60236468d.png) [@system](https://community.letsencrypt.org/u/system)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2017, 9:18am UTC](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/sslcertificatefile-file-etc-letsencrypt-live-example-com-cert-pem-does-not-exist-or-is-empty/23665/9 "2017-01-05T09:18:56Z")
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