Clarification please on installing and renewing wildcard domains

[blue928]

Hello! Thanks for a great script. I've run into a bit of trouble with auto-renew and wondering if I have set this up correctly.

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with Nginx.

I ran this command to get my wildcard certificates for my domain:

sudo ./.acme.sh/acme.sh --issue --nginx -d gastonia.com -d ‘*.gastonia.com’ --dns dns_cf

This is in my crontab -e for my user account:
25 0 * * * "/home/myname/.acme.sh"/acme.sh --cron --home "/home/myname/.acme.sh" > /dev/null

Here is what I'm trying to achieve:
-- acquire wildcard certificate for my domain name
-- have acme.sh modify nginx files for me and copy over the certificate files
-- auto renew so I never have to log in and manually renew.

So, I'm a little confused. Do I always have to run acme.sh --install-cert (step 3), even if I'm using the --nginx flag? Or is that handled for me? Or does that not apply when using wildcard domains?

Finally, I had a certificate come up for renewal, but auto renewal failed. Instead, I had to manually issue the renewal certificate using SUDO. The instructions say that I don't have to be root user to renew, but not sure how to achieve that. I know --nginx requires root user, so wondering if that could have messed that up.

Thanks for the clarification!

Steps to reproduce

Debug log

acme.sh  --issue .....   --debug 2

[FernandoMiguel]

In order to modify the nginx vhost you need sudo
The cron on the user account will have the same problem, lacks sudo

But you have a bigger problem : you are using BOTH nginx AND DNS methods.
Pick just one.

And last, you should use the flags to set where you want to store the keys and point you nginx vhost there

[FernandoMiguel]

Look at this example
https://github.com/FernandoMiguel/kb/blob/master/acme.sh/readme.md