Hi Jason,
I ran into that same issue and it took me days and many hours to figure out what was broken and how to fix it. So, I hope this information helps you and others encountering the same problem.
I was getting this error during execution of ./discourse-setup:
** FAILED TO BOOTSTRAP ** please scroll up and look for earlier error
In many attempts to fix this error, I tried these:
I ran ./discourse-doctor without any success.
I ran ./launcher rebuild app without any success.
I tried troubleshooting from within the container using: docker exec -it app /bin/bash
the container image has limited tools to troubleshoot, so I just read the logs using this cmd:
less /var/log/nginx/error.log
It was here where I saw lots of messages containing: [emerg] 2832#2832: cannot load certificate
For some reason I was not able to find the smoking gun, but when I exited the container and typed:
./launcher logs app from the host -
I was able to see more data and suddenly I found this error:
“Error creating new order :: too many certificates (5) already issued for this exact set of domains in the last 168 hours , retry after 2024-08-10T12:58:12Z:”
I googled workarounds for this issue, but then decided to just wait for the specified length of time.
After wait time elapsed, I tried this again: ./launcher rebuild app
This time it worked and the SSL certs ( *.cer ) were successfully created and my site was up.
The moral of the story here is that if you get an empty *.cer certificate, you need to check the container logs using this command from the host:
root@host:/var/discourse# ./launcher logs app
Scroll through the logs and search for “too many certificates”
If I had known this, it could have saved me days of research 
Assumptions made in my response:
- You have confirmed your host is properly configured with your DNS provider.
- You have confirmed your registration email and SMTP settings.
- You have confirmed
/var/discourse/containers/app.ymlwas properly populated.