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

Do you remember the times before this existed and you had to pay for your SSL certificates? I do! ↩︎

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to share your thoughts you can reply by email or hit me up on Mastodon or Bluesky.