Auto renewal for Let's Encrypt Apache

le-renew.sh

#!/bin/bash
#================================================================
# Let's Encrypt renewal script for Apache on Ubuntu/Debian
# @author Erika Heidi<erika@do.co>
# Usage: ./le-renew.sh [base-domain-name]
# More info: http://do.co/1mbVihI
#================================================================
domain=$1
le_path='/opt/letsencrypt'
le_conf='/etc/letsencrypt'
exp_limit=30;

get_domain_list(){
        certdomain=$1
        config_file="$le_conf/renewal/$certdomain.conf"
        
	if [ ! -f $config_file ] ; then
                echo "[ERROR] The config file for the certificate $certdomain was not found."
                exit 1;
        fi

        domains=$(grep --only-matching --perl-regex "(?<=domains \= ).*" "${config_file}")
        last_char=$(echo "${domains}" | awk '{print substr($0,length,1)}')

        if [ "${last_char}" = "," ]; then
                domains=$(echo "${domains}" |awk '{print substr($0, 1, length-1)}')
        fi

        echo $domains;
}

if [ -z "$domain" ] ; then
        echo "[ERROR] you must provide the domain name for the certificate renewal."
        exit 1;
fi

cert_file="/etc/letsencrypt/live/$domain/fullchain.pem"

if [ ! -f $cert_file ]; then
	echo "[ERROR] certificate file not found for domain $domain."
	exit 1;
fi

exp=$(date -d "`openssl x509 -in $cert_file -text -noout|grep "Not After"|cut -c 25-`" +%s)
datenow=$(date -d "now" +%s)
days_exp=$(echo \( $exp - $datenow \) / 86400 |bc)

echo "Checking expiration date for $domain..."

if [ "$days_exp" -gt "$exp_limit" ] ; then
	echo "The certificate is up to date, no need for renewal ($days_exp days left)."
	exit 0;
else
	echo "The certificate for $domain is about to expire soon. Starting renewal request..."
	domain_list=$( get_domain_list $domain )
	"$le_path"/letsencrypt-auto certonly --apache --renew-by-default --domains "${domain_list}"
	echo "Restarting Apache..."
	/usr/sbin/service apache2 reload
	echo "Renewal process finished for domain $domain"
	exit 0;
fi

Thanks for your script and your blog article.
To avoid any hickups of the webserver you could also go for a graceful restart, like replacing line 58 with:

apachectl -k graceful

a bit cleaned up script and removed need for some tools
https://gist.github.com/bmanojlovic/3a42ae0c19ca34f941b8

Added timestamp at the top, to make logging more clear:

https://gist.github.com/benyanke/3162eecd17c859c59f88

Ubuntu 15.10 requires bc (sudo apt-get install bc)

@erikaheidi Thanks for your script and blog article.
Here's a combined version of @bmanojlovic and @benyanke:
https://gist.github.com/b-alidra/b28cbe0b546a45f4a76a

I got [ERROR]: certificate file not found for domain but the actual error was to simply run it as sudo

Hello,

When my cert is about to expire, I got this error:

The certificate for example.com is about to expire soon. Starting renewal request...
Requested domain  is not a FQDN

@juanito003, i have the same problem... no solution ?

@juanito003, and same here... any luck on fixing that?

So this doesn't work anymore, by the looks of it the config_file from line 15's format has changed, and no longer contains the domain names, so the net result of the get_domain_list function is an empty string ' ' on top of that the --domains option doesn't work any more either, so line 56 that actually does the hard work wouldn't work even if it didn't have a blank where the list of domains should be..

don't really know enough about bash scripting to fix it without spending a lot of time on it, but if you take the code in line 56

"$le_path"/letsencrypt-auto certonly --apache --renew-by-default --domains "${domain_list}"

and convert it, and run the command

/etc/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto certonly --apache --renew-by-default -d yourdomain.com -d www.yourdomain.com

assuming /etc/letsencrypt is where you installed letsencrypt it should execute correctly, then service apache2 reload to start using the new cert.

I used this script for a while and found it wasn't working either. This article really helped me:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-apache-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-14-04

It covers starting out through settings up auto-renew, but it definitely covered all the bases for me.

How does this compare to certbot for renewal? Is this script created before certbot was around? Which is the best practice today?