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ZachiNachshon
ZachiNachshon

Posted on • Originally published at blog.zachinachshon.com

Install Certificate Manager Controller in Kubernetes

Credits: Logo by cert-manager.io

Automate the process of issuing public key certificates from multiple sources, ensuring they are valid, up to date and renew before expiration.

 

Note: This post is a quick start guide for deploying and using cert-manager on a Kubernetes cluster.

 

Prerequisites

 

Why do we need to worry about certificates? When declaring a domain name i.e my-website.domain.com and addressing it from either internal network and/or public internet, the devices used to perform the call (web browsers, internal services, containers etc..) would require to check its validity. In order to do that, the domain name should have a certificate that is issued and trusted to operate securely.

Why do we need a certificate manager? Certificate validity has its expiration date, which means certificates have to get renewed. It might be a cumbersome task when there are many certificates to handle. This is the reason cert-manager exists, to help with issuing certificates from a variety of sources, such as Let’s Encrypt, a simple signing key pair or self signed. It will ensure certificates are valid, up to date and attempt to renew certificates at a configured time before expiry.

Note: The domain referenced in this post is MY_DOMAIN, please change accordingly. If you interested in a local-only work mode, you don't have to pay for a new domain, just decide on a name and use it. For example, if your desired domain is homelab.com, replace MY_DOMAIN with homelab.

 

K8s Controller

cert-manager is a Kubernetes controller that manage the certificate aspect of a cluster state. It looks after the state of certificates on a specific cluster and issue new ones or request to renew existing ones before expiration.

Prepare

Tip: This preparation step is relevant only if you wish to deploy the cert-manager pod on a specific cluster node such as master for example, otherwise please continue to the next Install step.

We want Kubernetes to create the cert-manager pod on the master node. In order to do that, we'll have to label that node and use nodeSelector attribute when installing cert-manager Helm chart.

  1. Get all nodes names and labels

    kubectl get nodes --show-labels
    

     

  2. Label kmaster node with node-type=master

    kubectl label nodes kmaster node-type=master
    

     

    Note: I'll refer to the master node named kmaster as specified in the RPi cluster installation post, replace the name with the one you have assigned to the master node on your Kubernetes cluster.

  3. Verify that label had been created successfully

    kubectl get nodes --show-labels | grep node-type
    

     

Install

  1. Create a cert-manager namespace

    kubectl create namespace cert-manager
    

     

  2. Disable resource validation on the cert-manager namespace

    kubectl label namespace cert-manager certmanager.k8s.io/disable-validation=true
    

     

    Note: cert-manager deploys a webhook component to perform resource validations on Issuer, ClusterIssuer and Certificate. This webhook shouldn't run on the same namespace the cert-manager is deployed on.

  3. Add the required Helm repository

    helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io
    

     

  4. Update your local Helm chart repository cache

    helm repo update
    

     

  5. Search for latest jetstack/cert-manager official Helm chart version

    helm search repo cert-manager
    
    # NAME                      CHART VERSION     APP VERSION
    # jetstack/cert-manager     v1.2.0            v1.2.0
    

     

  6. Install the cert-manager Helm chart using the version from previous step

    Without node affinity:

    helm upgrade --install cert-manager \
        --namespace cert-manager \
        --version v1.2.0 \
        jetstack/cert-manager \
        --set installCRDs=true
    

     

    With node affinity (if you have followed the Prepare step):

    helm upgrade --install cert-manager \
        --namespace cert-manager \
        --version v1.2.0 \
        --set nodeSelector.node-type=master \
        --set webhook.nodeSelector.node-type=master \
        --set cainjector.nodeSelector.node-type=master \
        jetstack/cert-manager \
        --set installCRDs=true
    

     

    Note: Make sure you are running on Kubernetes > v1.19 to have the installCRDs flag available.

  7. Verify installation

    # Make sure all cert-manager deployed pods are running
    kubectl get pods --namespace cert-manager
    
    # Make sure custom resources *.cert-manager.io were created successfully 
    kubectl get crd | grep cert-manager
    
    # Verify that ClusterIssuer is non-namespaced scoped ('false')
    # so it can be used to issue Certificates across all namespaces
    kubectl api-resources | grep clusterissuers
    

     

Uninstall

  1. Remove cert-manager from the cluster

    helm uninstall cert-manager --namespace cert-manager
    

     

  2. Clear the namespace

    kubectl delete namespaces cert-manager
    

     


Self Signed

 

What? The self signed issuer does not represent a certificate authority as such, but instead denotes that certificates will be signed through “self signing” using a given private key.

Why? This means that the provided private key of the resulting certificate will be used to sign its own certificate.

When? This Issuer type is useful for bootstrapping the CA certificate key pair for some Private Key Infrastructure (PKI), or for otherwise creating simple certificates. Clients consuming these certificates have no way to trust this certificate since there is no CA signer apart from itself, and as such, would be forced to trust the certificate as is.

Who? Clients consuming these certificates could be services deployed to our local Kubernetes cluster that are exposed from outside the cluster such as Kubernetes dashboard, Jenkins UI, Private Docker Registry UI etc..

Issuer

  1. Create a certificate ClusterIssuer

    cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
    apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1alpha2
    kind: ClusterIssuer
    metadata:
      name: MY_DOMAIN-ca-issuer
    spec:
      selfSigned: {}
    EOF
    

     

    Important: cert-manager issues certificates through an Issuer. The Issuer can issue certificates for the namespace it is created on, but a ClusterIssuer can create certificates for any namespace.

  2. Wait for status to become Ready

    kubectl get clusterissuers MY_DOMAIN-ca-issuer -o wide
    

     

Certificate

When creating a new certificate, make sure to create one on a named namespace. It'll get verified by cert-manager even-though it exists on a different namespace since we're referencing a ClusterIssuer.

Tip: Replace MY_NAMESPACE with the namespace of your choise.

  1. Create a namespaced X.509 certificate (check here for official schema)

    cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
    apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1alpha2
    kind: Certificate
    metadata:
      name: MY_DOMAIN-com-cert
      namespace: MY_NAMESPACE
    spec:
      secretName: MY_DOMAIN-com-cert-secret
      isCA: true
      commonName: '*.MY_DOMAIN.com'
      organization:
        - MY_DOMAIN
      dnsNames:
        - MY_DOMAIN.com
        - '*.MY_DOMAIN.com'
      keySize: 2048
      keyAlgorithm: rsa
      issuerRef:
        name: MY_DOMAIN-ca-issuer
        kind: ClusterIssuer
    EOF
    

     

  2. Check certificate status is Issued

    kubectl describe certificate MY_DOMAIN-com-cert --namespace MY_NAMESPACE
    

     

  3. Check that secret MY_DOMAIN-com-cert-secret was created successfully

    kubectl get secret --namespace MY_NAMESPACE
    kubectl get secret MY_DOMAIN-com-cert-secret -o yaml --namespace MY_NAMESPACE
    

     

  4. (Optional): When in need to delete a certificate

    # Delete certificate
    kubectl delete certificate MY_DOMAIN-com-cert --namespace MY_NAMESPACE
    
    # Delete the auto generated secret
    kubectl delete secret MY_DOMAIN-com-cert-secret --namespace MY_NAMESPACE
    

     

Secrets

Follow these instructions to export the cert-manager generated certificate secrets as local files.

Note: Sometimes there is a need to use the secret values from outside the Kubernetes cluster. Such example is setting the cert_file as a trusted certificate on a client machine (laptop / desktop), specially when using a self signed certificate.

  1. Create a local destination folder

    mkdir -p $HOME/temp/MY_NAMESPACE/cert-secrets
    export MY_DOMAIN=<insert-domain-name-here>
    export MY_NAMESPACE=<insert-namespace-here>
    

     

  2. Export the certificate secrets

    cert_file - client certificate path used for authentication

    kubectl get secret ${MY_DOMAIN}-com-cert-secret \
       --namespace ${MY_NAMESPACE} \
       -o jsonpath='{.data.tls\.crt}' | base64 -D \
       > $HOME/temp/${MY_NAMESPACE}/cert-secrets/cert_file.crt
    

     

    key_file - client key path used for authentication

    kubectl get secret ${MY_DOMAIN}-com-cert-secret \
       --namespace ${MY_NAMESPACE} \
       -o jsonpath='{.data.tls\.key}' | base64 -D \
       > $HOME/temp/${MY_NAMESPACE}/cert-secrets/key_file.key
    

     

    ca_file - CA certificate path used to verify the remote server cert file

    kubectl get secret ${MY_DOMAIN}-com-cert-secret \
       --namespace ${MY_NAMESPACE} \
       -o jsonpath='{.data.ca\.crt}' | base64 -D \
       > $HOME/temp/${MY_NAMESPACE}/cert-secrets/ca_file.crt
    

     

  3. Check that x3 secrets exported successfully

    ls -lah $HOME/temp/${MY_NAMESPACE}/cert-secrets
    

     

  4. Clear exported variables

    unset MY_DOMAIN MY_NAMESPACE
    

     

Trust

When addressing a Kubernetes ingress controller resource that had been signed with a self signed certificate secret, clients such as web-browsers would warn us of an invalid certificate authority or invalid certificate.

ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

err-cert-authority-invalid

ERR_CERT_INVALID

err-cert-invalid

 

Since we are the ones that created the certificate we would like to tell our clients (laptop/desktop) to trust it. This is how you trust a certificate on macOS, for other operating systems please refer to official documentation.

  1. Open the certificate file in macOS Keychain Access
  • CLI: open $HOME/temp/${MY_NAMESPACE}/cert-secrets/cert_file.crt
  • Other: double click on the cert_file.crt
  1. Double click on the *.MY_DOMAIN.com certificate and expand the Trust section

  2. Within the When using this certificate select Always Trust

  3. Open a web-browser and navigate to one of the domain names using the self signed certificate and verify that there are no errors


Advanced

This section contains non conventional tip & tricks, use it cautiously.

Share Secrets between Namespaces

When? Use when in need to copy a cert-manager generated certificate secret to a different namespace than the one it was created on.

Why? Useful when you need to reference the secret in some kind of ingress controller under its authentication spec which exists on a different namespace.

In order to solve this limitation we simple need to copy the secret to a different namespace as follows:

kubectl get secret MY_DOMAIN-com-cert-secret -n SOURCE_NAMESPACE -o yaml \
| sed s/"namespace: SOURCE_NAMESPACE"/"namespace: DESTINATION-NAMESPACE"/\
| kubectl apply -n DESTINATION-NAMESPACE -f -
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

 

Important: It is not advised to copy secrets manually since cert-manager would lose track of the secret as it was copied manually and when the time to renew is due, the secret would become invalid.


Summary

This post was a sneak peak on how to create certificates and manage their state using cert-manager Kubernetes controller.

What now? Now that you have a local self signed certificate, you can continue to create an ingress controller and expose internal web services within your home network such as Kubernetes dashboard, Jenkins UI, your web application UI with their own virtual hosted names i.e. kubernetes.MY_DOMAIN.com, jenkins.MY_DOMAIN.com, mydashboard.MY_DOMAIN.com etc..

Please leave your comment, suggestion or any other input you think is relevant to this post in the discussion below.


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