Wondering how to figure out Certbot auto restart Nginx to serve renewed certificates? Our Server Management Support team is here to lend a hand with your queries and issues.

Certbot auto restart Nginx

Did you know that we can run Certbot with the –nginx flag to make the necessary changes to the Nginx configuration so that we can enable SSL/TLS for our website? Alternatively, we can run Certboot with –webroot flag. This will push Certbot to fetch a certificate, but we have to handle integrating it with Nginx.

According to our experts, we can set up the certificates from Let’s Encrypt to be automatically renewed. In fact, Ubuntu includes a package in the Ubuntu repositories that offer an automatic renewal framework. But we have to reload the webserver to serve the renewed certificates. This can be overcome by using the –nginx flag to request certificates.

How to auto restart Nginx on Ubuntu

Certbot offers two different ways to renew certificates in Ubuntu 18.04:

A cron job
• A systemd timer

The cron job is located at /etc/cron.d/certbot. It is set to run every twelve hours. However, it will not run if systemd is not active.

Alternatively, the systemd timer handles certificate renewal by working in tandem with the certbot systemd service.

Rather than changing the cron job or the systemd service, we can edit a config file to change Certbot’s renewal behavior. In other words, we have to add the following line to the /etc/letsencrypt/cli.ini config file: deploy-hook = systemctl reload nginx

This pushes Certbot to restart Nginx after a certificate is renewed. In other words, Certbot reloads Nginx after a certificate renewal and not when the Certbot renewal check runs.

According to our experts, we can check if the changes made have come into effect by running certbot renew –dry-run. Although this will not renew any certificates, it will let us know if the deploy-hook command has been picked up by Certbot.

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Conclusion

To wrap things up, our Support Engineers gave us a closer look at auto-restarting Nginx with Certbot in order to serve renewed certificates.