Renew the Let's Encrypt certificate on your Digital Ocean Mastodon Instance
I have my own Mastodon instance. I set it up using Digital Ocean’s One-Click installer and it has been pretty easy to maintain so far.
I got an email from Let’s Encrypt1 saying I need to renew my certificate. I couldn’t find instructions to specifically renew certificates for Mastodon on Digital Ocean. My attempt at using the generic instructions for renewing a certificate didn’t work, because it turns out you need to turn your Mastodon service off first.
For posterity, here are all the steps:
1. SSH in to your droplet
2. Stop everything
sudo systemctl stop mastodon-sidekiq
sudo systemctl stop mastodon-streaming
sudo systemctl stop mastodon-web
sudo systemctl stop nginx
3. Renew the certificate
sudo certbot renew
4. Start up again
sudo systemctl start nginx
sudo systemctl start mastodon-web
sudo systemctl start mastodon-streaming
sudo systemctl start mastodon-sidekiq
Footnotes
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Do you remember the times before this existed and you had to pay for your SSL certificates? I do! ↩
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