Will certbot work with private IP address

[cstathis]

Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. https://crt.sh/?q=example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.

My domain is: enacom.com.au

I ran this command: "sudo certbot --nginx -d grafana.enacom.com.au -d www.grafana.enacom.com.au"

It produced this output:
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator nginx, Installer nginx
Requesting a certificate for grafana.enacom.com.au and www.grafana.enacom.com.au
Performing the following challenges:
http-01 challenge for grafana.enacom.com.au
http-01 challenge for www.grafana.enacom.com.au
Waiting for verification...
Challenge failed for domain grafana.enacom.com.au
Challenge failed for domain www.grafana.enacom.com.au
http-01 challenge for grafana.enacom.com.au
http-01 challenge for www.grafana.enacom.com.au

Certbot failed to authenticate some domains (authenticator: nginx). The Certificate Authority reported these problems:
Domain: grafana.enacom.com.au
Type: dns
Detail: no valid A records found for grafana.enacom.com.au; no valid AAAA records found for grafana.enacom.com.au

Domain: www.grafana.enacom.com.au
Type: dns
Detail: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for www.grafana.enacom.com.au - check that a DNS record exists for this domain; DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up AAAA for www.grafana.enacom.com.au - check that a DNS record exists for this domain

Hint: The Certificate Authority failed to verify the temporary nginx configuration changes made by Certbot. Ensure the listed domains point to this nginx server and that it is accessible from the internet.

Cleaning up challenges
Some challenges have failed.

My web server is (include version):

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): N/A

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: N/A

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):N/A

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you're using Certbot):
certbot --version
certbot 2.5.0

[Osiris]

Yes, but only using the dns-01 challenge, as the http-01 and tls-alpn-01 require access to the IP address and thus the IP address needs to be public. But the dns-01 challenge doesn't require the IP address, just access to the DNS zone.

[rg305]

Also, FYI:

nslookup grafana.enacom.com.au 8.8.8.8
Server:  dns.google
Address:  8.8.8.8
Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    grafana.enacom.com.au
Address:  10.10.20.50


nslookup www.grafana.enacom.com.au 8.8.8.8
Server:  dns.google
Address:  8.8.8.8
*** dns.google can't find www.grafana.enacom.com.au: Non-existent domain

[Rip]

The DNS challenge should work for you.

Test result for enacom.com.au: OK

[schoen]

@Osiris

Yes, but only using the dns-01 challenge, as the http-01 and tls-alpn-01 require access to the IP address and thus the IP address needs to be public. But the dns-01 challenge doesn't require the IP address, just access to the DNS zone.

Note that this would mean you can't use --nginx to obtain your certificate.

https://eff-certbot.readthedocs.io/en/stable/using.html#getting-certificates-and-choosing-plugins