Let's Encrypt

renew certs

Let's Encrypt is a certificate authority based in San Francisco that provides free X.509 certificates for SSL/TLS encryption.

There are many ways to renew certs. One way to do so on Ubuntu involves doing the following:

1. Briefly stop the web server (in this case, Apache)

$ sudo service apache2 stop

2. Renew the certs

$ sudo letsencrypt renew

3. Restart the web server if no errors appear after Step 2

$ sudo service apache2 start

On Debian 8/9 with EFF's Cerbot, try this instead:

$ sudo service nginx stop

$ sudo certbot renew

$ sudo service nginx start

delete certs

To delete a cert, run the following command:

$ sudo letsencrypt delete

A prompt usually follows asking you to select the cert to be deleted.