Ubuntu Nginx – Can’t Find Certbot Cron Job After Installation

certbotcronnginxUbuntu

I've developed a REST API in Node and installed nginx as reverse proxy in front of that in order to handle the SSL certificate from Letsencrypt. It's the first time I've set up nginx but everything seems to work as intended. The certbot installation was uneventful and the certificate is in place and works. My only concern is that I can't see any evidence of auto-renewal in place.

The Certbot docs say:

The command to renew certbot is installed in one of the following locations:

/etc/crontab/
/etc/cron.*/*
systemctl list-timers

I've checked all the above locations but there are no traces of certbot anywhere. Running sudo certbot renew --dry-run works without any error messages but no cron job or timer is created as far as I can see. Are the docs outdated or is the problem my lacking Linux skills?

The server is running Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS and nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu).

Best Answer

By default on Ubuntu 18.04+, certbot should add /etc/cron.d/certbot and run every 12 hours (*/12). If you do not see a file there, you can create your own cronjob by doing sudo crontab -e and adding a simple job that follows the template instructions. You'll need to be sure that cron understands where certbot lives, or use the full path. Generally the full path is a better bet than hoping cron knows your PATH. By default certbot should be at /usr/local/bin/certbot

You can verify where certbot lives by doing which certbot

The command you should enter in your cron job will be /path/to/certbot renew

To run a midnightly renewal every Day of the Month, Every Month, on every Day of the Week, if everything is default and you're using Ubuntu, the full line you'd add in cron would be:

# m h DoM Mon DoW        command:
  0 0 *   *   *          /usr/local/bin certbot renew
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