Plesk

Unable to issue or renew Let’s Encrypt certificate in Plesk for Windows: unauthorized 403 error

Symptoms

Let's Encrypt certificate could not be issued or renewed with the following error message:

Type: urn:ietf:params:acme:error:unauthorized

Status: 403

Detail: Invalid response from http://example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/MANdx2vNFLjJ5yy7cNaV88NiQzddIDU7Gj3bpwTCllA [203.0.113.2]: "<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">rn<html xmlns="http"

Cause

SSL It! extension misconfiguration.

Resolution

  1. Connect to the server via RDP.

  2. Run the following command in command prompt as Administrator to disable SSL It!:

    plesk ext sslit --common-challenge-dir -disable

  3. Run the following command to enable it back again:

    plesk ext sslit --common-challenge-dir -enable