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Let's Encrypt for Kubernetes

Let's Encrypt is a free, automated and open Certificate Authority. The kind of service you need if you want to have a secure website with https - yes I know that requires more than that - and it's now more straightforward to use than ever.

This about using Let's Encrypt for generating a certificate for your service on Kubernetes. There are several ways to do this, with more or less automation, cluster-wide or namespace bound or with a DNS or HTTP validation check.

I'll choose the route that was the easiest for me, and then I'll briefly look at the other options.

Prerequisites

There are some prerequisites required, that are best discussed on their own. So we will continue with the assumption that you have these in order.

  • valid Class A or CNAME domain name
  • kubernetes cluster
    • with ingress controller (such as nginx)
    • with helm and tiller installed in the cluster
  • web application

Steps

The steps to take to get a web application to get a certificate from Let's Encrypt are the following.

  • install cert-manager from the official helm chart
  • deploy a Issuer resource
  • deploy a certificate resource
  • confirm certificate and secret are created/filled
  • use in web app

Install Cert Manager

For more details on Cert Manager, I recommend reading their introduction.

In essence, it's a tool that helps you initiate a certificate request with a service such as Let's Encrypt.

You can install it via Helm, and it's meant to be installed only once per cluster. The once per cluster restriction is due to the usage of Custom Resource Definitions (CRD's) which will block any (re-)installation.

To confirm if there are any CRD's from cert-manager, you can issue the following command.

kubectl get customresourcedefinitions.apiextensions.k8s.io

The CRD's belonging to cert-manager are the following:

  • certificates.certmanager.k8s.io
  • clusterissuers.certmanager.k8s.io
  • issuers.certmanager.k8s.io

You will notice later, that we will use these CRD's for getting our certificate, so keep them in mind. To remove them in case of a re-install, you can issue the command below.

kubectl delete customresourcedefinitions.apiextensions.k8s.io \
    certificates.certmanager.k8s.io \
    clusterissuers.certmanager.k8s.io \
    issuers.certmanager.k8s.io

When you're sure there are no CRD's left, you can install cert-manager via it's helm chart. It has some options in case you need them, you read about them here, but in my case that wasn't needed.

helm install --name cert-manager --namespace default stable/cert-manager

Deploy Issuer

To be able to use a certificate we need to have a Certificate Issuer.

If you remember from our cert-manager, there are two CRD's that can take this role:

  • ClusterIssuer: clusterissuers.certmanager.k8s.io
  • Issuer: issuers.certmanager.k8s.io

Both issuer type can use two ways of providing the proof of ownership, either by dns-01 or http-01.

We'll be using the http-01 method, for the dns-01 method, refer to the cert-manager documenation.

ClusterIssuer

As the resource Kind implies, a ClusterIssuer is a cluster-wide resource and not bound to a specific namespace.

apiVersion: certmanager.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: ClusterIssuer
metadata:
  name: letsencrypt-staging
spec:
  acme:
    # The ACME server URL
    server: https://acme-staging.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
    # Email address used for ACME registration
    email: user@example.com
    # Name of a secret used to store the ACME account private key
    privateKeySecretRef:
      name: letsencrypt-staging
    # Enable the HTTP-01 challenge provider
    http01: {}

Issuer

Not everyone wants a cluster-wide resource, and not everyone has the rights to install something elsewhere than their namespace.

I prefer having as much as possible tied to a namespace - either a team or an application - I will use this type.

apiVersion: certmanager.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: Issuer
metadata:
  name: myapp-letsencrypt-staging
  namespace: myapp
spec:
  acme:
    # The ACME server URL
    server: https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
    # Email address used for ACME registration
    email: myadmin@myapp.com
    # Name of a secret used to store the ACME account private key
    privateKeySecretRef:
      name: myapp-letsencrypt-staging
    # Enable the HTTP-01 challenge provider
    http01: {}

There's a few things to note here:

  • server: this refers to the server executing the ACME test, in this case: Let's Encrypt Staging (with the v2 API)
  • email: this will be the account it will use for registering the certificate
  • privateKeySecretRef: this is the Kubernetes secret resource in which the privateKey will be stored, just in case you need or want to remove it

Deploy Certificate Resource

Next up is our Certificate resource, this is where cert-manager will store our certificate details to be used by our application.

In case you forgot, this is one of the three CRD's provided by cert-manager.

apiVersion: certmanager.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
  name: myapp-example-com
  namespace: myapp
spec:
  secretName: myapp-tls
  dnsNames:
  - myapp.example.com
  acme:
    config:
    - http01:
        ingressClass: nginx
      domains:
      - myapp.example.com
  issuerRef:
    name: myapp-letsencrypt-staging
    kind: Issuer

The things to note here:

  • name: so far I've found it a naming convention to write the domain name where - replaces the .'s.
  • secretName: the name of the Kubernetes secret that will house the certificate and certificate key
  • dnsNames: you can specify more than one name, in our case just a single one, should match acme.config.domains
  • acme.config: this defines the configuration for how the ownership proof should be done, this should match the method defined in the Issuer
  • issuerRef: in good Kubernetes fashion, we reference the Issuer that should issue our certificate, the name and kind should match our Issue resource

Confirm Resources

We have defined our set of resources that should create our valid - though not trusted, as it is staging - certificate. Before we use it, we should confirm our secret and our certificate are both valid.

kubectl describe certificate myapp-example-com --namespace myapp

The response includes the latest status, which looks like this:

Status:
  Acme:
    Order:
      URL:  https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/acme/order/705.../960...
  Conditions:
    Last Transition Time:  2018-10-02T21:17:34Z
    Message:               Certificate issued successfully
    Reason:                CertIssued
    Status:                True
    Type:                  Ready

Next up is our secret, containing the actual certificate and the certificate key.

kubectl describe secret myapp-tls --namespace myapp

Which results in something like this:

Name:         myapp-tls
Namespace:    myapp
Labels:       certmanager.k8s.io/certificate-name=myapp-example-com
Annotations:  certmanager.k8s.io/alt-names: myapp.example.com
              certmanager.k8s.io/common-name: myapp.example.com
              certmanager.k8s.io/issuer-kind: Issuer
              certmanager.k8s.io/issuer-name: myapp-letsencrypt-staging

Type:  kubernetes.io/tls

Data
====
tls.crt:  3797 bytes
tls.key:  1679 bytes

Use certificate to enable https

Assuming the secret and the certificate are correct, we can use them to enable https on our web app.

We put the tls certificate on the ingress of the application, in this case, Nginx, which assumes the following about the app:

  • it has a deployment or stateful set
  • it has a service which provides and endpoint to one or more instances
  • it has an nginx ingress which points to the service

Deployment

kind: Deployment
apiVersion: apps/v1
metadata:
  name: myapp
  namespace: myapp
  labels:
    app: myapp
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: myapp
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: myapp
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: myapp
        image: caladreas/catnip-master
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8087

You should always include livenessprobe, resource limits and so on. But for the sake of brevity, these are omitted!

Service

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: myapp
  namespace: myapp
  labels:
    app: myapp
spec:
  selector:
    app: myapp
  ports:
  - name: http
    port: 80
    targetPort: 8087
    protocol: TCP

Ingress

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: myapp
  namespace: myapp
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: "nginx"
    ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect: "true"
    certmanager.k8s.io/issuer-kind: Issuer
    certmanager.k8s.io/issuer-name: myapp-letsencrypt-staging
spec:
  rules:
  - host: myapp.example.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        backend:
          serviceName: myapp
          servicePort: 80
  tls:
  - hosts:
    - myapp.example.com
    secretName: myapp-tls

Further resources

Last update: 2019-08-31 13:12:00