# Signing Certificate

## Incident

Date: 2026-07-16

Symptoms:

- Documents remained in PENDING after every signer completed.
- Audit logs confirmed recipients signed.
- Background jobs repeatedly failed during document sealing.

Root Cause:

The signing certificate was not usable by the Documenso application.

Verified production configuration:

Certificate:

/opt/documenso/cert.p12

Permissions:

-rw-r--r--

Owner:

node:node

Environment Variable:

NEXT_PRIVATE_SIGNING_LOCAL_FILE_PATH=/opt/documenso/cert.p12

Verification:

Container reported:

CERTIFICATE_READABLE: YES

Documenso reported:

{"isAvailable":true}

Result:

The previously stuck document completed successfully after the certificate configuration was corrected.

This document serves as the authoritative recovery reference if document sealing ever fails again.