Error with a subdomain

[sevaa]

Trying to use certbot-dns-cpanel against a subdomain hosted with Cpanel 102.0.23.

There an add-on domain, yarxi.ru. There is a subdomain underneath that, test.yarxi.ru. I'm issuing the following command:

certbot run --authenticator certbot-dns-cpanel:cpanel --installer certbot-dns-cpanel:cpanel --certbot-dns-cpanel:cpanel-credentials cred.ini --logs-dir . --config-dir . --work-dir . -d test.yarxi.ru,www.test.yarxi.ru

and getting the following output:

Saving debug log to /home/seva/ssl/yx.ru/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator certbot-dns-cpanel:cpanel, Installer certbot-dns-cpanel:cpanel
Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing...
Renewing an existing certificate
Performing the following challenges:
dns-01 challenge for test.yarxi.ru
dns-01 challenge for www.test.yarxi.ru
Cleaning up challenges
Error adding TXT record: Unable to find SOA record.

The debug log is attached.

letsencrypt.zip

EDIT: it boils down to an error in response to the ZoneEdit/add_zone_record API method:

2023-01-04 12:19:59,120:DEBUG:certbot_dns_cpanel.dns_cpanel:add_zone_record: url='http://www.example.com:2082/json-api/cpanel', data='{
    "cpanel_jsonapi_user": "johndoe",
    "cpanel_jsonapi_apiversion": "2",
    "cpanel_jsonapi_module": "ZoneEdit",
    "cpanel_jsonapi_func": "add_zone_record",
    "domain": "test.boo.org",
    "name": "_acme-challenge",
    "type": "TXT",
    "txtdata": "s5tJpM0ACh1aGkJs1kFSpIM_rk1Qnholop71hgR_d3I",
    "ttl": 60
}', response data='{
    "postevent": {
        "result": 1
    },
    "apiversion": 2,
    "event": {
        "result": 1
    },
    "data": [
        {
            "result": {
                "status": 0,
                "newserial": null,
                "statusmsg": "Unable to find SOA record."
            }
        }
    ],
    "func": "add_zone_record",
    "module": "ZoneEdit",
    "preevent": {
        "result": 1
    }
}'

That's misconfiguration of the site, not a bug in certbot-dns-cpanel.

[sevaa]

You can work around the issue by supplying the 2nd level domain as the domain arg and moving the subdomain part into the name portion. In other words, the operation succeeds if instead of "domain": "test.boo.org","name": "_acme-challenge" we provide "domain": "boo.org","name": "_acme-challenge.test".

Tbe fix boils down to the cpanel_zone = max(matching_zones, key = len) line in _get_zone_and_name; were it to use the min instead, the workaround would kick in and the whole thing would work. PR #19 does exactly that.