Symlinks not being updated, even thought new certificates are created #458

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adam · 2025-12-29T01:25:36+01:00

adam commented

2025-12-29 01:25:36 +01:00

Originally created by @frederickjh on GitHub (Feb 13, 2020).

dehydrated creates symlinks to the current PEM-encoded certificate files. These are named

cert.pem (and cert.csr) for the certificate (resp. the CSR)
chain.pem for the intermediary certifcate, which the server needs to send too
fullchain.pem for the concatenation of the above two
privkey.pem for the file containing the private key

These links were created when I first created certificates now new certificates are successfully created but the symlinks are not updated to point to the new files.

The relevant code is 307eaadddf/dehydrated (L1073-L1079)

When I turn on shell debugging with:

set -x
PS4=':${LINENO} + '

and then run dehydrated it does not run these lines of code. I am running dehydrated with the following options: dehydrated --force --cron --domain "subdomain.example.com *.subdomain.example.com".
It the config file: CHALLENGETYPE="dns-01"

Any ideas as to why the symlinks are not being updated?

I see in this closed issue #368 that the deploy_cert hook can be used for this but I thought dehydrated should do this out of the box.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give!
Frederick

Originally created by @frederickjh on GitHub (Feb 13, 2020). dehydrated creates symlinks to the current PEM-encoded certificate files. These are named - `cert.pem` (and `cert.csr`) for the certificate (resp. the CSR) - `chain.pem` for the intermediary certifcate, which the server needs to send too - `fullchain.pem` for the concatenation of the above two - `privkey.pem` for the file containing the private key These links were created when I first created certificates now new certificates are successfully created but the symlinks are not updated to point to the new files. The relevant code is https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated/blob/307eaadddfd49aeafda6984f11e6731329372cd5/dehydrated#L1073-L1079 When I turn on shell debugging with: ```shell set -x PS4=':${LINENO} + ' ``` and then run dehydrated it does not run these lines of code. I am running dehydrated with the following options: `dehydrated --force --cron --domain "subdomain.example.com *.subdomain.example.com"`. It the config file: CHALLENGETYPE="dns-01" Any ideas as to why the symlinks are not being updated? I see in this closed issue #368 that the `deploy_cert` hook can be used for this but I thought dehydrated should do this out of the box. Thanks in advance for any help you can give! Frederick

adam closed this issue

2025-12-29 01:25:36 +01:00

adam commented

2025-12-29 01:25:37 +01:00

@lukas2511 commented on GitHub (Feb 17, 2020):

Mh, it should definitively update those symlinks... does it maybe exit before updating the symlinks? If your hook-script doesn't allow for unknown hooks it might cause dehydrated to exit when trying to run the sync_cert hook. I'm going to change the behaviour of this in the next few days so that in cases like that dehydrated will exit with an appropriate error message instead of silently failing...

@lukas2511 commented on GitHub (Feb 17, 2020): Mh, it should definitively update those symlinks... does it maybe exit before updating the symlinks? If your hook-script doesn't allow for unknown hooks it might cause dehydrated to exit when trying to run the `sync_cert` hook. I'm going to change the behaviour of this in the next few days so that in cases like that dehydrated will exit with an appropriate error message instead of silently failing...

adam commented

2025-12-29 01:25:37 +01:00

@frederickjh commented on GitHub (Feb 17, 2020):

I did a bit more digging, only to find that the issue is not with dehydrated. It is with the hooks scripts I am using for DNSexit. When the hook fails it does so silently. I figured this out when I noticed not all of the files were being created and the pem file was 0 bytes. Sorry for filing this non-issue.

@frederickjh commented on GitHub (Feb 17, 2020): I did a bit more digging, only to find that the issue is not with dehydrated. It is with the hooks scripts I am using for DNSexit. When the hook fails it does so silently. I figured this out when I noticed not all of the files were being created and the pem file was 0 bytes. Sorry for filing this non-issue.

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Reference: starred/dehydrated#458