Fix issues with Let’s Encrypt while using HestiaCP

Recently I installed HestiaCP on touhou.si’s webserver. Why do you ask? Well, Touhou is a nonprofit organization that just got free hosting from Akademska in raziskovalna mreža Slovenije (ARNES) that comes with no licenses. Since the members are mostly not tech-savvy using my regular approach without any web interface was going to be a nightmare (for example for them to add a new email address) and most of the are used to cPanel. I did previously use ISPConfig that my friend Mitja got me accustomed to (was it 10 years ago?!), but I wanted something a bit more lightweight and proper Nginx support (well, and something that did not have so many bugs). I checked around and I found VestiaCP and from there on I found its fork HestiaCP.

The most astonishing for me being used to ISPConfig was the single-line installer for HestiaCP. Up till now, everything worked fine, except good ol’ Let’s Encrypt. While I see many people posting that this issue is unsolvable and that there is an issue with HestiaCP the fix could not be any simpler. This will fix the command not found and New auth status 400 issues.

So following the official tutorial (found here) to install Let’s Encrypt for HestiaCP we need two commands:

v-change-sys-hostname host.domain.tld

v-add-letsencrypt-host

While most users now get an error like this:

(Sorry for the bad quality screenshots I was too lazy to open up a proper SSH connection to the server and I’m using QEMU)

So why don’t the commands work? Well, you simply need to define the source with a one-line command:

source /etc/profile 

That is it. But do not forget you have to set the host every time or you will get an error like this (the last two lines represent it working after using the proper “chain-of-command”) :

So that’s it. Let’s Encrypt will be issued within seconds and your HestiaCP will work again without any SSL issues.