# Installation produced broken, zero byte certificate

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/installation-produced-broken-zero-byte-certificate/117466>\
**Category:** Self-hosting\
**Tags:** letsencrypt\
**Created:** [May 11, 2019, 2:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/installation-produced-broken-zero-byte-certificate/117466 "2019-05-11T14:55:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![n1bff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/e95f7d/32.png) [@n1bff](https://meta.discourse.org/u/n1bff)\
**Post date:** [May 11, 2019, 2:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/installation-produced-broken-zero-byte-certificate/117466/1 "2019-05-11T14:55:18Z")

</div>

Let’s call my site [example.com](http://example.com) for this post, it uses a FQDN and things worked before. Due to some debugging of mail issues I have been redeploying and rebuilding many times in the past 24 hours.

I installed Discourse following [discourse/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md)

Now my site does not load (no reply on port 80 or 443). nginx’s log says:

`2019/05/11 14:49:14 [emerg] 7866#7866: cannot load certificate "/shared/ssl/example.com.cer": PEM_read_bio_X509_AUX() failed (SSL: error:0906D06C:PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line:Expecting: TRUSTED CERTIFICATE)`

Entering the app and looking at the file, it is empty with zero/0 bytes:

```
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 11 13:59 /shared/ssl/example.com.cer
-rw------- 1 root root 3243 May 11 13:59 /shared/ssl/example.com.key

```

I am lost now and found no solutions so here I ask:

Can I trigger a renewal of the certificate using some built-in tool of the Discourse docker setup? If not, can I do something once to fix this and then be assured that renewals will be handled automatically by the setup as intended by it?

Is there an installation log? I searched but found no mention. I expect some errors related to letsencrypt and would like to investigate. Maybe I reached some limit.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/installation-produced-broken-zero-byte-certificate/117466)._