The routine is expected to be as follows:

Right? Well, yes, if your environment is up-to-date.  Result of the last command should be like:

Renewing SSl cert for https://re-wp.com
Reload : nginx [OK]
SUCCESS: Certificate was successfully renewed For https://re-wp.com
Your cert will expire within 89 days.
Expiration DATE: Tue Sep 12 08:23:00 UTC 2017

You might come up to this problem, though:

Renewing SSl cert for https://re-wp.com
ERROR : Cannot RENEW SSL cert !
Your current cert already EXPIRED !
Check logs for reason tail /var/log/ee/ee.log & Try Again!!!

Let’s have a look at the logs then! Do you find there a line, stating like setuptools pkg_resources pip wheel failed with error code 1 ?

If so, then here is what you have to try:

1. Check if this solved the issues. Some people were happy to find it as a sole solution of the problem:
   
   apt-get install letsencrypt

   1	apt–get install letsencrypt

2. If that didn’t help, maybe this:
   
   export LC_ALL=”en_US.UTF-8″ export LC_CTYPE=”en_US.UTF-8″

   1 2	export LC_ALL=“en_US.UTF-8” export LC_CTYPE=“en_US.UTF-8”

3. Here comes the long shot (which helped me personally):
   
   apt-get install python-pip pip install setuptools export LC_ALL=”en_US.UTF-8″ export LC_CTYPE=”en_US.UTF-8″ pip install setuptools pip install –upgrade setuptools

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

   apt–get install python–pip   pip install setuptools   export LC_ALL=“en_US.UTF-8”   export LC_CTYPE=“en_US.UTF-8”   pip install setuptools   pip install —upgrade setuptools

Running the command for renewing the certificate should work just fine this time.