Debugging GitLab Pages on a self-managed instance can be a hassle, especially if you’re only getting nebulous messages without any further information.

Do note, for this to work, you’ll need to have an admin access to the machine hosting the main Rails app.

To find out exactly why Let’s Encrypt is failing to get a certificate, use the following command:

docker compose exec gitlab gitlab-ctl tail gitlab-rails --follow | grep -i "encrypt\|acme\|certificate"Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

It should output the exact log of Let’s Encrypt and tell you if it’s hurting a wall somewhere. If you have a bare-metal instance, just remove the docker part of the command, and only use gitlab-ctl.