Certbot needs a DNS A record set

I was running certbot --apache to setup the SSL certificate for Apache server and I got the following error message.

Failed authorization procedure. pscdoc.com (http-01): urn:ietf:params:acme:error:unauthorized 
    :: The client lacks sufficient authorization :: Invalid response from 
    https://pscdoc.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/2-E0YjvS1234569EDFSFEF[35.248.116.211]: 
    "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN\">\n<html><head>\n
    <title>404 Not Found</title>\n</head><body>\n<h1>Not Found</h1>\n<p"

Solution

For certbot, you need a DNS A record to point to your IP address. Therefore, I created a DNS A record set for my domain name to point to the IP address of my website. To test out whether the DNS A record set is working or not, I wait for 30 minutes for the changes to be effective. Then, open my website using my domain name(e.g. http://pscdoc.com). The domain name does resolve. Finally, I re-run certbot --apache and the SSL certificate was created successfully.

Certbot

About the author

Xuan Ngo is the founder of OpenWritings.net. He currently lives in Montreal, Canada. He loves to write about programming and open source subjects.