Issue using certbot with nginx

I'm actually working on a webapp, I use Reactjs for the frontend and Golang for the backend. Those 2 programs are hosted separately on 2 VMs on Google-Compute-Engine. I want to serve my app through https so I choose to use Nginx for serving the frontend in production. Firstly I made my config file for Nginx:

#version: nginx/1.14.0 (ubuntu) server { listen 80 default_server; listen [::]:80 default_server; root /var/www/banshee; server_name XX.XXX.XX.XXX; #public IP of my frontend VM index index.html; location / { try_files $uri /index.html =404; } } 

For this part everything works as expected but after that I want to serve my App over https following this tutorial. I installed the packages software-properties-common,python-certbot-apache and certbot but when I tried

sudo cerbot --nginx certonly

I get the following message:

gdes@frontend:/etc/nginx$ sudo certbot --nginx certonly Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log Could not choose appropriate plugin: The requested nginx plugin does not appear to be installed The requested nginx plugin does not appear to be installed 

I made some searches on Google and here and I still can't figure out which plugin is missing or an other way to fix this.

Does someone have an idea tohelp me ?

Thanks a lot :)

5 Answers

I was trying to create Let's Encrypt certificate using certbot for my sub-domain and had the following issue. Command:

ubuntu@localhost:~$ certbot --nginx -d my_subdomain.website.com -d my_subdomain2.website.com

Issue:

The requested Nginx plugin does not appear to be installed

Solution:

Ubuntu 20+

ubuntu@localhost:~$ sudo apt-get install python3-certbot-nginx

Earlier Versions

ubuntu@localhost:~$ sudo apt-get install python-certbot-nginx

You will need to replace

apt install python-certbot-nginx 

by

apt install python3-certbot-nginx 

You can install the Certbot nginx plugin with the following commands:

add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot apt update apt install python-certbot-nginx 

You have to re-install a python3 version of Lets Encrypt's certbot.

Run

sudo apt-get install python3-certbot-nginx 

On Debian 10, certbot returns a "could not find a usable nginx binary" issue because, "/usr/sbin" is missing from the PATH. Add /usr/sbin to the PATH

export PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH 

Then certbot can make a certificate for nginx

certbot --nginx -d <server name> --post-hook "/usr/sbin/service nginx restart" 

As explained on the debian wiki page for letsencrypt.