Back in January I wrote an article about using Let’s Encrypt with Multiple Virtual Host Files and now I know a better way to do it. The problem I ran into was the script throwing an error when renewing the certificate.  After a little research the easiest way to get a robust installation is to follow Erika Heidi‘s instructions in How to Set Up Let’s Encrypt Certificates for Multiple Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu 14.04. Now the script to renew the certificate works.
I found two problems that might people trying to implement SSL.
- The script kept generating a message saying, “No vhost exists with servername”. for two of my sites. When I looked into my site configuration file I found that I was still using a VirtualHost section to re-direct www.wehuberconsultingllc.com to wehuberconsultingllc.com. The script was upset that I had multiple VirtualHosts for the site. If I added a ServerAlias for the www address in the first VirtualHost section and deleted the extra VirtualHost section from my vhost configuration file, the script would find the site and create the certificate.
- When you are managing multiple WordPress sites I like to update the plugins via wordpress.com. The problem is that as soon as I implemented mandatory SSL for a WordPress site, Jetpack was no longer able to fetch plugin status and instead displayed the “error fetching plugins” message. After a lot of fiddling around I figured out that I could fix this problem by going to the Settings-General menu and changing the URL for the blog to https.