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Chris Halcrow
Asked: 2021-09-07 21:48:54 +0800 CST

What process does certbot run as on Linux?

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I'm guessing certbot must operate as a continual running service on Linux however using ps on a server that uses Let's Encrypt certificate auto-renewal, I'm not seeing any obvious process for certbot. If it's running successfully, is there a central process for certbot, and if so, what is it?

I can find the version with apt-cache policy certbot | grep Installed - in my case 0.25.0-1~bpo9+1

linux security ssl certbot

1 Answers

  1. Certbot is a Python program. So it runs as some version of python3 (currently minimum version supported is 3.6).

    And, notice it doesn't run for most of the time. It is started periodically by cron or systemd-timers (whichever is used on your system), checks and renews certficates and stops.

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