Mohammad is experiencing a “Privacy Error” (NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID) on his Discourse forum ask.mybloggertricks.com after manually updating his SSL certificate from ZeroSSL. Despite re-uploading domain.crt and domain.key to /var/discourse/shared/standalone/ssl and rebuilding the app, the site continues to serve an expired Let’s Encrypt certificate from January 17 (expired April 17), not the new ZeroSSL one. Community members itsbhanusharma, Stephen, and danb35 advise against manual certificate management, noting that Discourse has built-in Let’s Encrypt automation, which is more reliable. danb35 clarifies that ZeroSSL is just a front-end for Let’s Encrypt and confirms the site is still serving the old cert. He suggests using Discourse’s automated Let’s Encrypt setup, referencing this guide. lucasbasquerotto asks if Mohammad restarted the container or reloaded nginx after updating files. danb35 requests the output of openssl x509 -in domain.crt -text -noout to verify the cert contents, questioning whether documentation instructed him to place files in that directory. Mohammad initially installed manually because built-in Let’s Encrypt wasn’t available at the time, but Stephen notes it’s now standard in all current installs.
I have installed the https://zerossl.com free SSL certificate before on my forum ask.mybloggertricks.com using PUTTY. But when I tried updating it by following the same process, no matter how many times I try to update, I am continuously getting this error message
Your connection is not private
Attackers might be trying to steal your information from ask.mybloggertricks.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more
I echo the others’ questions about why you aren’t using the built-in Let’s Encrypt support, rather than manually getting the cert and attempting to install it. But regardless of why you’re doing it this way, the error is telling you that the cert date is invalid, which is because it expired in April. You’ll need to either figure what you’re doing wrong in the manual cert installation, or figure out how to use the built-in automated support (with the latter being the better plan, IMO).
I installed it manually because at that time the built-in Let’s encrypt support was not available. Let me try once more and get back for help. Let me check the date which I am 100% sure is correct but still I will try once more.
Hi I just re-uploaded my domain.crt and domain.key to cd/var/discourse/shared/standalone/ssl but I am getting the same error that my certificate has expired and its pointing towards Let’s encrypt Authority X3 while in fact my certificate is provided by https://zerossl.com/free-ssl/#crt
That’s to be expected--zerossl.com doesn’t issue certificates; they’re simply a web-based front-end to Let’s Encrypt.
I don’t know what you uploaded or where, but you’re still serving an old cert–it expired on 17 April. You’ve issued five more certs since then (see here for details), most recently today, but your site is still using the cert issued 17 January (which expired 17 April). This is just one of the many reasons why you should use an automated system to get certs from Let’s Encrypt, and that’s really what you should do here. This looks like a good place to start:
Was there some documentation that told you that this is where those files should go? And you can use the openssl command to view the cert details and make sure they’re correct–run openssl x509 -in domain.crt -text -noout. What’s the output of that command?