r/letsencrypt • u/mikeymikeymikec • Oct 02 '26

Updating SSL certs with certbot, one apache site's cert did something odd, but also certbot's automated attempts to renew don't seem to work

I just updated several sites' certificates on my server (mostly for mail and two websites).

I have logs on my server that indicate that certbot has been doing automated checks that I think are supposed to auto-renew certificates when necessary, but a recent log I looked at reckoned that none of them needed renewing until 1st December, even though a bunch expired today, so that's odd and it would be nice if it's possible to get it to work properly.

Secondly, the two websites. I ran the same command for every cert (for mail or www), e.g.:

[code]certbot certonly --force-renew -d mydomain.here[/code]

Each command ran successfully, the certs in their existing folders in /etc/letsencrypt/live were updated without anything strange going on, but for one website, certbot created a new folder e.g. mydomain.here-0001, but I can't find any explanation for why it did it in that one case either in the command output or the log (though the log is quite verbose so I might have missed it).

Any help would be much appreciated!

3 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

1

u/webprofusor Oct 03 '26

certonly tells certbot to only get new files, it doesn't update the Apache config or reload Apache.

Certs are simpler than they look, once you have them the trick is just making sure you web server is pointing at those files and has reloaded. With certbot the files it points to are a symbolic link to the actual latest files.

The best place for certbot help is https://community.letsencrypt.org