Can't create new certificate with letsencrypt/nginx - nginx

Question

I am trying to use Certbot to get new SSL cert for new domain, but I'm getting an error:
An unexpected error occurred:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x92 in position 715: invalid start byte
Please see the logfiles in /var/log/letsencrypt for more details.
This is the output from the letsencrypt log, not sure how to fix this.
2021-09-28 11:24:03,054:DEBUG:certbot.main:certbot version: 0.31.0
2021-09-28 11:24:03,055:DEBUG:certbot.main:Arguments: []
2021-09-28 11:24:03,056:DEBUG:certbot.main:Discovered plugins: PluginsRegistry(PluginEntryPoint#manual,PluginEntryPoint#nginx,PluginEntryPoint#null,PluginEntryPoint#standalone,PluginEntryPoint#webroot)
2021-09-28 11:24:03,064:DEBUG:certbot.log:Root logging level set at 20
2021-09-28 11:24:03,065:INFO:certbot.log:Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
2021-09-28 11:24:03,066:DEBUG:certbot.plugins.selection:Requested authenticator None and installer None
2021-09-28 11:24:03,194:DEBUG:certbot.log:Exiting abnormally:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/certbot", line 11, in <module>
load_entry_point('certbot==0.31.0', 'console_scripts', 'certbot')()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/main.py", line 1365, in main
return config.func(config, plugins)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/main.py", line 1101, in run
installer, authenticator = plug_sel.choose_configurator_plugins(config, plugins, "run")
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/plugins/selection.py", line 225, in choose_configurator_plugins
authenticator = installer = pick_configurator(config, req_inst, plugins)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/plugins/selection.py", line 25, in pick_configurator
(interfaces.IAuthenticator, interfaces.IInstaller))
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/plugins/selection.py", line 106, in pick_plugin
verified.prepare()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/plugins/disco.py", line 251, in prepare
return [plugin_ep.prepare() for plugin_ep in six.itervalues(self._plugins)]
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/plugins/disco.py", line 251, in <listcomp>
return [plugin_ep.prepare() for plugin_ep in six.itervalues(self._plugins)]
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/plugins/disco.py", line 132, in prepare
self._initialized.prepare()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot_nginx/configurator.py", line 152, in prepare
self.parser = parser.NginxParser(self.conf('server-root'))
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot_nginx/parser.py", line 38, in __init__
self.load()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot_nginx/parser.py", line 45, in load
self._parse_recursively(self.config_root)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot_nginx/parser.py", line 66, in _parse_recursively
self._parse_recursively(subentry[1])
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot_nginx/parser.py", line 56, in _parse_recursively
trees = self._parse_files(filepath)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot_nginx/parser.py", line 207, in _parse_files
parsed = nginxparser.load(_file)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot_nginx/nginxparser.py", line 123, in load
return loads(_file.read())
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/codecs.py", line 321, in decode
(result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x92 in position 715: invalid start byte
2021-09-28 11:24:03,196:ERROR:certbot.log:An unexpected error occurred:

Answer 1

Based on the bug report from github, this is a unicode issue in configuration file.
Solution #1 - You need to generate an UTF-8 locale and launch certbot with it.
Like this:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 certbot […]
Or, Solution #2 - replace unicode characters in nginx config
You can find the offending line with following command and delete it.
grep -r -P '[^\x00-\x7f]' /etc/apache2 /etc/letsencrypt /etc/nginx
And rerun certbot command.