Letsencrypt certificate renewal: Nginx with reverse-proxy

Let’s Encrypt revolutionized the SSL certificate management for websites in a short span of time — it directly improved the security of users of the world wide web by: (1) making it very simple to deploy SSL certificates to websites by administrators and (2) make the certificates available free of cost. To appreciate their efforts, compare to what hoops one had to jump through to obtain a certificate from a certificate authority (CA) and how much money and energy one would have to spend on it.

I make use of letsencrypt in all the servers I manitain(ed) and in the past used the certbot tool to obtain & renew certificates. Recent versions of certbot are only available as a snap package, which is not something I’d want to or able to setup in many cases.

Enter acme. It is shell script that works great. Installing acme will also setup a cron job, which would automatically renew the certificate for the domain(s) near its expiration. I have recently setup dict.sayahna.org using nginx as a reverse proxy to a lexonomy service and acme for certificate management. The cron job is supposed to renew the certificate on time.

Except it didn’t. Few days ago received a notification from about imminent expiry of the certificate. I have searched the interweb quite a bit, but didn’t find a simple enough solution (“make the proxy service redirect the request”…). What follows is the troubleshooting and a solution, may be someone else find it useful.

Problem

acme was unable to renew the certificate, because the HTTP-01 authentication challenge requests were not answered by the proxy server where all traffic was being redirected to. In short: how to renew letsencrypt certificates on an nginx reverse-proxy server?

Certificate renewal attempt by acme would result in errors like:

# .acme.sh/acme.sh --cron --home "/root/.acme.sh" -w /var/www/html/
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:17 AM UTC] <strong>===Starting cron===</strong>
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:17 AM UTC] <strong>Renew: 'my.domain.org'</strong>
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:18 AM UTC] Using CA: https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:18 AM UTC] Single domain='my.domain.org'
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:18 AM UTC] Getting domain auth token for each domain
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:20 AM UTC] Getting webroot for domain='my.domain.org'
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:21 AM UTC] Verifying: my.domain.org
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:24 AM UTC] <strong>my.domain.org:Verify error:Invalid response from https://<strong>my.domain</strong>.org/.well-known/acme-challenge/Iyx9vzzPWv8iRrl3OkXjQkXTsnWwN49N5aTyFbweJiA [NNN.NNN.NNN.NNN]:</strong>
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:24 AM UTC] <strong>Please add '--debug' or '--log' to check more details.</strong>
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:24 AM UTC] <strong>See: https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/wiki/How-to-debug-acme.sh</strong>
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:28:25 AM UTC] <strong>Error renew <strong>my.domain</strong>.org.</strong>

Troubleshooting

The key error to notice is

Verify error:Invalid response from https://my.domain.org/.well-known/acme-challenge/Iyx9vzzPWv8iRrl3OkXjQkXTsnWwN49N5aTyFbweJiA [NNN.NNN.NNN.NNN]

Sure enough, the resource .well-known/acme-challenge/… is not accessible. Let us try to make that accessible, without going through proxy server.

Solution

First, create the directory if it doesn’t exist. Assuming the web root as /var/www/html:

# mkdir -p /var/ww/html/.well-known/acme-challenge

Then, edit /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/my.domain.org and before the proxy_pass directive, add the .well-known/acme-challenge/ location and point it to the correct location in web root. Do this on both HTTPS and HTTP server blocks (otherwise it didn’t work for me).

 6 server {
 7   listen 443 default_server ssl;
...
43   server_name my.domain.org;
44   location /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
45     root /var/www/html/;
46   }
47  
48   location / {
49     proxy_pass http://myproxyserver;
50     proxy_redirect off;
51   }
...
83 server {
84   listen 80;
85   listen [::]:80;
86 
87   server_name my.domain.org;
88 
89   location /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
90     root /var/www/html/;
91   }
92 
93   # Redirect to HTTPS
94   return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;

Make sure the configuration is valid and reload the nginx configuration

nginx -t && systemctl reload nginx.service

Now, try to renew the certificate again:

# .acme.sh/acme.sh --cron --home "/root/.acme.sh" -w /var/www/html/
...
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:45:01 AM UTC] Your cert is in  /root/.acme.sh/my.domain.org/dict.sayahna.org.cer 
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:45:01 AM UTC] Your cert key is in  /root/.acme.sh/my.domain.org/my.domain.org.key 
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:45:01 AM UTC] v2 chain.
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:45:01 AM UTC] The intermediate CA cert is in  /root/.acme.sh/my.domain.org/ca.cer 
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:45:01 AM UTC] And the full chain certs is there:  /root/.acme.sh/my.domain.org/fullchain.cer 
[Sat 08 May 2021 07:45:02 AM UTC] _on_issue_success

Success.