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Hosting Operations

List Certbot Certificates

You need to see Certbot-managed certificates and included domains.

Command

certbot certificates

What changed

Nothing changes. The command prints certificate inventory.

Danger

safe

When to use it

Use this before renewing, expanding, or debugging Let's Encrypt certificates.

When not to use it

Do not assume public DNS is correct just because a certificate exists locally.

Undo or recovery

No state is changed.

Expected output

Certificate names, domains, and expiry details.

demo script

Disposable terminal steps

  1. certbot certificates
  2. curl -sI https://example.com
  3. dig +short example.com A
Terminal transcript Demo JSON

simulated output

What it looks like

disposable vessel 
::fixture-ready::
$ certbot certificates
Certificate Name: example.com
    Domains: example.com www.example.com
    Expiry Date: 2026-09-23 10:00:00+00:00 (VALID: 90 days)
::exit-code::0
$ curl -sI https://example.com
HTTP/2 200
server: fake-nginx
x-content-type-options: nosniff

::exit-code::0
$ dig +short example.com A
203.0.113.10
::exit-code::0

YouTube Short

List the certs before changing SSL.

Before editing SSL config, check what Certbot already knows about the domain.

LinkedIn hook

The certificate existed. The question was which domains it covered.

Question: Do you check Certbot inventory before changing SSL config?

experiments

A/B tests to run

Metric: linkedin_save_rate

A: List Certbot certificates.

B: The cert existed. Which domains did it cover?