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This article discusses how to renew Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates that you have installed on your Droplet. It does not pertain to the Let’s Encrypt certificates that DigitalOcean manages for load balancers.

Let’s Encrypt uses the client Certbot to install, manage, and automatically renew the certificates they provide. In the case where your certificate does not automatically renew on your Droplet, you can manually trigger the renewal at any time by running:

sudo certbot renew

If you have multiple certificates for different domains and you want to renew a specific certificate, use:

sudo certbot certonly --force-renew -d example.com

The --force-renew flag tells Certbot to request a new certificate with the same domains as an existing certificate. The -d flag allows you to renew certificates for multiple specific domains.

To confirm that a certificate renewed, list your certificates and check each one’s expiry date:

sudo certbot certificates

To test your renewal setup without renewing anything, run:

sudo certbot renew --dry-run

A dry run uses the Let’s Encrypt staging server and doesn’t save any certificates to disk. If it returns no errors, automatic renewal is set up correctly.

Related Topics

How do I fix a "system not initialized" error on multi-GPU Droplets?

Make sure NVIDIA Fabric Manager is running and has the same version number as the GPU drivers.

Why am I getting a Droplet autoscale pool error?

There may be an issue with the autoscale pool or Droplet configuration, the VPC network’s size, or resource limits on the team or datacenter.

How to Troubleshoot Load Balancer Health Check Issues

Health checks often fail due to firewalls or misconfigured backend server software.