mjhjmtu

System: GNU/Linux Debian 9.5 headless.

Situation & Question

I have just caught the Let's Encrypt Certbot to re-generate the SSL certificate but did not reload Apache2. This has resulted in a half-day not functioning domain. I want to automate this. How to go about it?

This is my current Certbot CRON file /etc/cron.d/certbot:

# /etc/cron.d/certbot: crontab entries for the certbot package
#
# Upstream recommends attempting renewal twice a day
#
# Eventually, this will be an opportunity to validate certificates
# haven't been revoked, etc. Renewal will only occur if expiration
# is within 30 days.
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

0 */12 * * * root test -x /usr/bin/certbot -a ! -d /run/systemd/system && perl -e 'sleep int(rand(43200))' && certbot -q renew

This can be simply accomplished by adding:

&& apachectl -k graceful

to the daily Certbot command.

This way, twice a day:

• The certificates will get checked for expiration and if expired, then they'll get renewed.




• Apache will get reloaded. Apache will advise its threads to exit when idle, and then apache reloads the configuration.