Discourse failure to renew certificate

[RBoy]

Continuing the conversation from here:

Letsencrypt certificate failure to renew

I think it’s been years since I’ve seen a let’s encrypt certificate fail to renew, but I’ve had three sites in the past week or two that have stale certificates. A rebuild fixes it and I have heretofore failed to look for clues in the logs. Next time I’ll do a bit more to diagnose the problem before fixing it for the site.

I got a reminder from Redsift that my certificates are going to expire in a week. Usually discourse will renew the certificates well ahead of time. This time not so, before I start doing a rebuild (which is supposed to solve the issue), @Falco is there anything you want me to check and post back here to help get to the root of why the certificates did not renew?

The root certificate is ISRGX1 and here is the expiring certificate information:

Common Name (CN)	E6
Organization (O)	Let’s Encrypt
Organizational Unit (OU)
Issued On	Wednesday, July 16, 2025 at 7:36:45 PM
Expires On	Tuesday, October 14, 2025 at 7:36:44 PM

The current build is 3.6.0.beta1-dev (7ee52c8f85)

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

There was a period of time that the endpoint that let’s encrypt needed was redirected. That’s fixed if you rebuild.

[Dannii]

About how long after I update should the certificate be renewed?

[featheredtoast (Jeff Wong)]

If memory serves the certificates are valid for 3 months, and they will now attempt to auto renew before then.

[Dannii]

Yes I know how it’s meant to work.

But it’s been over a day since I updated the forum software and the certificate doesn’t appear to have been updated yet. It’s got 5 days before it expires so it really needs to be renewed soon.

I’m on the Discouse stable branch if that makes a difference. Is it possible the endpoint fix hasn’t been backported?

[RBoy]

For me the certificate updated immediately after the rebuild

[Dannii]

Did you rebuild through the web or via the command line?

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Yes, the explanation was here:

Let's Encrypt certificate doesn't automatically renew, but rebuilding does trigger the renewal

I recently worked on the le cert renewal. It is the http to https redirect - acme does not handle being told to redirect well at all and by default attempts to connect on the same protocol (http) as it did when it was setup initially Recent updates to the let’s encrypt template should fix these renewals going forward.

[Dannii]

My forum has finally updated its certificate after I did a command line rebuild.

[lessLost (Michael)]

We have had the same experience of SSL not renewing.

It would be great if someone could double check that web.ssl.template is behaving correctly on discourse-docker, it appeared to me that port 80 was not actually serving any /.well-known/ URLs used by Let’s Encrypt, all URLs were forwarding to SSL including test files I manually placed into /var/www/discourse/public/.well-known/ . I had to edit /etc/nginx/conf.d/outlets/before-server/20-redirect-http-to-https.conf directly inside the app container.

Perhaps this started after commit ae4887a of discourse-docker?

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

There was another error with the well known route in recent memory.

When’s the last time you did a rebuild?