Trying to renew cert on nginx but getting "Problem binding to port 443: Could not bind to IPv4 or IPv6"

I’m trying to renew my cert for my personal site, but it seems to be failing (issue with port 443).

Thanks in advance for your help!

My domain is: www.retrosockets.io

I ran this command:

/opt/letsencrypt/certbot-auto certonly --standalone

I’ve also tried:

/opt/letsencrypt/certbot-auto-renew

And got the same output.

It produced this output:

Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Please enter in your domain name(s) (comma and/or space separated)  (Enter 'c'
to cancel):www.retrosockets.io retrosockets.io
Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing...
Renewing an existing certificate
Performing the following challenges:
tls-sni-01 challenge for www.retrosockets.io
tls-sni-01 challenge for retrosockets.io
Cleaning up challenges
Problem binding to port 443: Could not bind to IPv4 or IPv6.

My web server is (include version): nginx/1.10.0 (Ubuntu)

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):
Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS

My hosting provider, if applicable, is:
Digital Ocean

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

1 Like

I think I resolved this. Had to shut down the nginx server, run the command, and then restart. Not my favorite solution, but it worked.

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This happened because you used --standalone. The purpose of that option is to launch a temporary webserver because you don’t have one running.

Next time use the --webroot method, and you’ll be able to use your already running nginx server.

3 Likes

That’s very helpful! Thank you!

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