First, this post is more for me as a reminder should I have this problem again. But, if it helps you resolve your problem, yea!

Problem (tl;dr version): Certbot didn’t update the ssl certificates on one of my servers, resulting in ugly messages about the websites not being safe.

Long Version: I’m hosting my own sites on Amazon EC2 servers running AMI flavor of Linux. About a year ago I upgraded from standard webpages to ssl to make Google and other search engines happy. Everything was going fine until recently when the site didn’t renew the certificates for SSL from Let’s Encrypt.

While I had followed the Amazon tutorial exactly (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/SSL-on-an-instance.html#letsencrypt) Certbot wasn’t running any longer. After troubleshooting, I found that it was a common problem with the latest versions of certbot. There were a lot of solutions provided by various people, none worked correctly. What did work is:

Solution:
On the github website (https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/1680#issuecomment-358728515) I found a solution that worked:
sudo rm -rf /opt/eff.org/*
pip install -U certbot
sudo certbot renew –-debug

I did have to make one change since I was using the -auto version of certbot:
sudo ./certbot-auto renew –-debug

Now the solutions is available should I (or anyone else) need it!