Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.

asennett's avatar

LetsEncrypt Failure

I have a server running on Forge + Digital Ocean. I currently have 1 app running on my domain (example.com) and 5 running on subdomains (example.example.com). I tried to install a 6th subdomain (its a laravel repo) and installation went fine. When I tried to install LetsEncrypt it failed and I got the error below. It doesn't look like much of an error but that is what forge is telling me. LetsEncrypt has worked easily on all of my domains and subdomains until now. I reached out to Forge but they did not respond. I think that is because my question is unrelated or not covered by their terms of agreement. Any guidance is highly appreciated as I'm out of carrots and sticks on this one. Ps. the asterisks below are numbers, I just wasn't sure which number could be shown or not. Thanks

Creating well known challenge directory... Installing LetsEncrypt client... Cloning into 'letsencrypt**********'... Configuring client... Restarting Nginx... Generating Certificate...

INFO: Using main config file /root/letsencrypt**********/config

  • Generating account key...
  • Registering account key with ACME server...
  • Done!

INFO: Using main config file /root/letsencrypt**********/config

0 likes
6 replies
asennett's avatar

and now all of my ssl certificates are not working.. perhaps I renewed them too much trying to error fix? idk.

laurent1979's avatar

try ‘ journalctl -xe ‘ I use rhel or centos and these commands always give me good infos. Also ‘ systemctl nginx status’ Might be different on debian based distros tho. Assuming you’re on linux tho..

laurent1979's avatar

Letsencrypt has a command to reinstall existing certificates, you don’t want to renew them if not needed.

asennett's avatar

I ran 'journalctl -xe' Not sure what I'm supposed to be looking for there. I thought LetsEncrypt was supposed to be easy. I suppose if this is easy, I'd hate to see hard lol. I'm still not sure what to do.

laurent1979's avatar

Journalctl should tell you if nginx is running, and if not why it crashed, reinstalling and adding certificates sometimes leads to a conflict within config file, and the problem is as it’s done automatically, when there’s a problem it’s a pain to find the problem. Do you have access to your sites on non ssl connection ?

asennett's avatar
asennett
OP
Best Answer
Level 2

So.. I don't actually know if what I did fixed my problem or not because Taylor stepped in and helped out. Last week, I installed a wordpress plugin that messed up my ability to install letsencrypt certs (at least I think thats what did it). I had a snapshot on digital ocean that I used to restore the server to before installation of wordpress plugin and I think that fixed it. I'm green light now. I think it was that wordpress plugin but I can't say for sure. Either way, the forge customer service is worth the $$$ unless you're just tinkering. Just my 2 cents.

Please or to participate in this conversation.