Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028.
This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the technical requirements that we must follow. All publicly-trusted Certificate Authorities like Let’s Encrypt will be making similar changes. Reducing how long certificates are valid for helps improve the security of the internet, by limiting the scope of compromise, and making certificate revocation technologies more efficient.



Technically my renews aren’t automated. I have a nightly cronjob that should renew certificates and restart services, but when the certificates need renewal, it always fails because it wants to open a port I’m already using in order to answer the challenge.
I hear there’s an apache module / configuration I can use, but I never got around to setting it up. So, when the cron job fails, I get an email and go run a script that stops apache, renews certs, and restarts services (including apache). I will be a bit annoying to have to do that more often, but maybe it’ll help motivate me to configure apache (or whatever) correctly.
Debian Stable
The usual way for me is to give certbot write access to a directory in the HTTP root, so the server can keep running.
It does have access to the HTTP root directories. But, it still can’t open port 80/443 when apache already has that port open.
EDIT: I guess my
certbot renewjust needs to be reconfigured to use a--webroot, so it doesn’t try to listen on it’s own.You could try using the DNS challenge instead; I find it a lot more convenient as not all my services are exposed.
While I do have some control over my DNS and can create arbitrary TXT entries, I can’t to that in an automated way easily. I’m using Gandi.net to host my DNS rather than running my own DNS sever(s).
EDIT: Gandi is listed https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/dns-providers-who-easily-integrate-with-lets-encrypt-dns-validation/86438 so maybe I can automate a DNS-01 challenge without too much issue, I just have to switch away from
certbotto one of the other tools.