How to Renew LetsEncrypt SSL Certificates

This only applies to existing domains that already have pre-existing certificates from LetsEncrypt.

If you have not noticed, when you are using Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, they will only give the first SSL certificate for 3 months. Subsequently, you will need to generate/renew the SSL certificate.

If you are running custom droplets or servers, you might need to use the “sudo” command-line interface to renew it. This can apply to servers from DigitalOcean.com, Linode, Amazon AWS Machines and upCloud.

Step 1

Login to your SSH interface. Switch to sudomode if you prefer.

Step 2

Stop the NGINX or Apache web server, because letencrypt needs to use port 80 to bind the certificate.

Command (usable on CentOS 7x or similar):

sudo systemctl stop nginx

Once this is done, move on to step 3

Step 3

Now generate a certificate for your existing website. This is why we have used the sub-command certonly

sudo /usr/bin/letsencrypt certonly -d domain.com

Step 4

Once this is done, you need to start your web server again

sudo systemctl start nginx

Optional: You can find more information from this forum post at DigitalOcean.