Letsencrypt renewal fails: Could not bind to IPv4 or IPv6.. Skipping

Question

The full error message I'm getting is:

Attempting to renew cert from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/somedomain.com.conf produced an unexpected error: Problem binding to port 443: Could not bind to IPv4 or IPv6.. Skipping.

This is running on an AWS ubuntu 14.04 instance. All ports are open outgoing and 443 is open incoming.

Answer 1

you probably run the script with (preconfigurated) --standalone when your server is already running at port 443.

You can stop server before renew and start them after.

man says:

--apache          Use the Apache plugin for authentication & installation
--standalone      Run a standalone webserver for authentication
--nginx           Use the Nginx plugin for authentication & installation
--webroot         Place files in a server's webroot folder for authentication
--manual          Obtain certificates interactively, or using shell script hooks

If I run renew with --apache I can't get any error.

Answer 2

You just need to stop all running servers like Apache, nginx or OpenShift before doing this.

Stop Nginx

sudo systemctl stop nginx

Stop Apache2

sudo systemctl stop apache2