Staging maintenance and database reset, 2 March 2021

Next week, on 2 March 2021, we will be clearing certificate and order data in our Staging Environment as part of a larger database modernization project. We will not be clearing account data, so clients will not need to re-register, and rate-limit exceptions for staging will continue to work as planned.

The effects of this change on clients using our staging environment will include, but are not limited to:

  • The staging OCSP responders will return “unauthorized” for all certificates issued before the reset.
  • The staging API will return errors for orders that began before the reset.
  • The staging API will return errors for both retrieval and revocation of certificates issued before the reset.
  • Domains authorized by the staging API before the reset will need to be reauthorized.
  • Point-in-time rate-limit calculations for the staging API will be reset.

We’ll be scheduling a multi-hour maintenance period next week on letsencrypt.status.io to perform the database work, during which time the Staging API will be unavailable. We encourage you to subscribe to our status notifications for details. We’ll update this topic as well.

We provide no data durability guarantees for our Staging environment, but we do take maintaining it seriously. In this instance, staging’s purpose of testing changes before production is best served by getting those changes under test as soon as possible. We recognize that clearing Staging’s data isn’t optimal, but the modernization efforts underway give us better tools to manage Staging’s data size going forward.

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We've finished performing the maintenance in staging and restarted issuance.

Since order and certificate data has been cleared, clients using the staging API may encounter errors for missing data; restarting a given order should work fine.

As a reminder, account data wasn't cleared, so clients should not need to re-register.

Thanks for understanding.

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