Installing Let's Encrypt on Amazon Linux 2023

Question

I am trying to get SSL certificate with Let's Encrypt nginx on Amazon Linux 2023.

• First, I added EPEL using the commands

  wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
  

  and

  sudo rpm -ihv --nodeps ./epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
  

  and it installed with no problem
• Then I tried

  sudo yum install python3-certbot-nginx
  

  and got the error message:

  Problem: package certbot-1.22.0-1.el8.noarch requires python3-certbot = 1.22.0-1.el8, 
  but none of the providers can be installed
    - conflicting requests
    - nothing provides python3.6dist(setuptools) >= 39.0.1 needed by python3-certbot-1.22.0-1.el8.noarch
    - nothing provides python3.6dist(cryptography) >= 2.5.0 needed by python3-certbot-1.22.0-1.el8.noarch
    - nothing provides python3.6dist(configobj) >= 5.0.6 needed by python3-certbot-1.22.0-1.el8.noarch
    - nothing provides python3.6dist(distro) >= 1.0.1 needed by python3-certbot-1.22.0-1.el8.noarch
    - nothing provides /usr/bin/python3.6 needed by python3-certbot-1.22.0-1.el8.noarch
    - nothing provides python3.6dist(pytz) needed by python3-certbot-1.22.0-1.el8.noarch
    - nothing provides python(abi) = 3.6 needed by python3-certbot-1.22.0-1.el8.noarch
    (try to add '--skip-broken' to skip uninstallable packages)
  

• I also tried

  sudo dnf install python3-certbot-nginx
  

  but got a similar error.

I learned I may need a code ready builder but haven't been able to install it. Please how can I get it. If that is not the issue, please what I'm I doing wrong and how can I resolve it?

Answer 1

I managed to get certbot installed in Amazon Linux 2023 in /opt/certbot/bin/certbot using the following commands:

sudo dnf install -y augeas-libs
sudo python3 -m venv /opt/certbot/
sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install --upgrade pip
sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install certbot

Or if you wanted a specfic version of certbot installed you could replace the last command with:

sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install certbot==2.6.0

In our setup we use the standalone mode with some hooks instead of using plugins. If you want to use plugins like dns, apache or nginx you should modify the last install command to something like pip install certbot-apache.

Answer 2

Thank you to Jens for getting me on the right track. However, I found I needed additional steps to get it fully working. You may also need the module(s) for your specific web server software, and I wanted to be able to invoke "certbot" as a command from wherever. So I had to change that last line and add another to do those things:

sudo dnf install -y augeas-libs
sudo python3 -m venv /opt/certbot/
sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install --upgrade pip
sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install certbot certbot-apache
sudo ln -s /opt/certbot/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbot

Alter to match your web server software as necessary.

Answer 3

It appears the EPEL 8 version of Certbot is built for a version of Python (v3.6) that is not available in Amazon Linux 2023.

I found this note that seems to indicate that none of the EPEL repositories are compatible with Amazon Linux 2023.

According to the Amazon Linux 2023 documentation on installing Certbot it looks like they suggest installing Certbot using pip from the default version of Python3 into a virtual environment. You should also be able to pip install certbot-nginx to get the nginx plugin

EDIT

It looks like the linked AWS documentation no longer has instructions for installing certbot, but they do link to the official certbot installation instructions which still mentions that pip is one of the alternative installation methods.

Answer 4

sudo dnf install -y augeas-libs
sudo python3 -m venv /opt/certbot/
sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install --upgrade pip
sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install certbot certbot-nginx 

This was working for me, but the symlink did not work so I used certbot directly from the /opt location

sudo /opt/certbot/bin/certbot certonly --nginx ....