How to renew your Ghost blog's Let's Encrypt SSL certificate

Keeping your self hosted Ghost blog online by updating your SSL certificate

When you originally setup your Ghost blog you enabled SSL right? Here's how to update it via the command line once that certificate expires.

Jump into your VPS via SSH as the user you originally setup Ghost as.

0. Change to your Ghost directory
cd /opt/ghost/myblog

1. Update your Ghost blog software [note: may prompt you for sudo]
ghost update

2. Renew the certificate
ghost setup ssl-renew

3. Switch over to the root user
sudo -i

4. Upgrade the acme.sh script inside the /etc/letsencrypt directory
"/etc/letsencrypt"/acme.sh --upgrade --home "/etc/letsencrypt"

5. Renew the SSL certificate through acme.sh
"/etc/letsencrypt"/acme.sh --cron --home "/etc/letsencrypt" --debug --log --force

For some reason I needed to add --force on my instance.  For good measure restart your web server service such as Apache or Nginx to make sure they pick up the new certificate.

While you are in your VPS, you may as well update all the things and then give it a good reboot. We like to keep out Linux servers fresh and healthy ;)

Now that you are renewed the browsers should see your new certificate and allow for happy blog reading.

Have fun