kube-lego is an older Jetstack project for obtaining TLS certificates from Let's Encrypt (or another ACME server).
Since cert-managers release, kube-lego has been gradually deprecated in favour of this project. There are a number of key differences between the two:
Feature | kube-lego | cert-manager |
---|---|---|
Configuration | Annotations on Ingress resources | CRDs |
CAs | ACME | ACME, signing keypair |
Kubernetes | v1.2 - v1.8 | v1.7+ |
Debugging | Look at logs | Kubernetes Events API |
Multi-tenancy | Not supported | Supported |
Distinct issuance sources per Certificate | Not supported | Supported |
Ingress controller support (ACME) | GCE, nginx | All |
This guide will walk through how you can safely migrate your kube-lego installation to cert-manager, without service interruption.
By the end of the guide, we should have:
- Scaled down and removed kube-lego
- Installed cert-manager
- Migrated ACME private key to cert-manager
- Created an ACME ClusterIssuer using this private key, to issue certificates throughout your cluster
- Configured cert-manager's :doc:`ingress-shim </reference/ingress-shim>` to
automatically provision Certificate resources for all Ingress resources with
the
kubernetes.io/tls-acme: "true"
annotation, using the ClusterIssuer we have created - Verified that the cert-manager installation is working
Before we begin deploying cert-manager, it is best we scale our kube-lego deployment down to 0 replicas. This will prevent the two controllers potentially 'fighting' each other. If you deployed kube-lego using the official deployment YAMLs, a command like so should do:
$ kubectl scale deployment kube-lego \
--namespace kube-lego \
--replicas=0 \
You can then verify your kube-lego pod is no longer running with:
$ kubectl get pods --namespace kube-lego
cert-manager should be deployed using Helm, according to our official :doc:`/getting-started/index` guide. No special steps are required here. We will return to this deployment at the end of this guide and perform an upgrade of some of the CLI flags we deploy cert-manager with however.
Please take extra care to ensure you have configured RBAC correctly when deploying Helm and cert-manager - there are some nuances described in our deploying document!
In order to continue issuing and renewing certificates on your behalf, we need to migrate the user account private key that kube-lego has created for you over to cert-manager.
Your ACME user account identity is a private key, stored in a secret resource.
By default, kube-lego will store this key in a secret named kube-lego-account
in the same namespace as your kube-lego Deployment. You may have overridden
this value when you deploy kube-lego, in which case the secret name to use will
be the value of the LEGO_SECRET_NAME
environment variable.
You should download a copy of this secret resource and save it in your local directory:
$ kubectl get secret kube-lego-account -o yaml \
--namespace kube-lego \
--export > kube-lego-account.yaml
Once saved, open up this file and change the metadata.name
field to something
more relevant to cert-manager. For the rest of this guide, we'll assume you
chose letsencrypt-private-key
.
Once done, we need to create this new resource in the kube-system
namespace.
By default, cert-manager stores supporting resources for ClusterIssuers in the
namespace that it is running in, and we used kube-system
when deploying
cert-manager above. You should change this if you have deployed cert-manager into
a different namespace.
$ kubectl create -f kube-lego-account.yaml \
--namespace kube-system
We need to create a ClusterIssuer which will hold information about the ACME account previously registered via kube-lego. In order to do so, we need two more pieces of information from our old kube-lego deployment: the server URL of the ACME server, and the email address used to register the account.
Both of these bits of information are stored within the kube-lego ConfigMap.
To retrieve them, you should be able to get
the ConfigMap using kubectl
:
$ kubectl get configmap kube-lego -o yaml \
--namespace kube-lego \
--export
Your email address should be shown under the .data.lego.email
field, and the
ACME server URL under .data.lego.url
.
For the purposes of this guide, we will assume the lego email is
user@example.com
and the URL https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
.
Now that we have migrated our private key to the new Secret resource, as well as obtaining our ACME email address and URL, we can create a ClusterIssuer resource!
Create a file named cluster-issuer.yaml
:
apiVersion: certmanager.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: ClusterIssuer
metadata:
# Adjust the name here accordingly
name: letsencrypt-staging
spec:
acme:
# The ACME server URL
server: https://acme-staging-v02.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 from step 3
privateKeySecretRef:
name: letsencrypt-private-key
# Enable the HTTP-01 challenge provider
http01: {}
We then submit this file to our Kubernetes cluster:
$ kubectl create -f cluster-issuer.yaml
You should be able to verify the ACME account has been verified successfully:
$ kubectl describe clusterissuer letsencrypt-staging
Name: letsencrypt-staging
Namespace:
Labels: <none>
Annotations: <none>
API Version: certmanager.k8s.io/v1alpha1
Kind: ClusterIssuer
Metadata:
Cluster Name:
Creation Timestamp: 2017-11-30T22:33:40Z
Generation: 0
Resource Version: 4450170
Self Link: /apis/certmanager.k8s.io/v1alpha1/letsencrypt-staging
UID: 83d04e6b-d61e-11e7-ac26-42010a840044
Spec:
Acme:
Email: user@example.com
Http 01:
Private Key Secret Ref:
Key:
Name: letsencrypt-private-key
Server: https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
Status:
Acme:
Uri: https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/acme/acct/11217539
Conditions:
Last Transition Time: 2018-04-12T17:32:30Z
Message: The ACME account was registered with the ACME server
Reason: ACMEAccountRegistered
Status: True
Type: Ready
Now that our ClusterIssuer is ready to issue certificates, we have one last thing to do: we must reconfigure ingress-shim (deployed as part of cert-manager) to automatically create Certificate resources for all Ingress resources it finds with appropriate annotations.
More information on the role of ingress-shim can be found
:doc:`in the docs </reference/ingress-shim>`, but for now we can just run a
helm upgrade
in order to add a few additional flags. Assuming you've named
your ClusterIssuer letsencrypt-staging
(as above), run:
helm upgrade cert-manager \
stable/cert-manager \
--namespace kube-system \
--set ingressShim.defaultIssuerName=letsencrypt-staging \
--set ingressShim.defaultIssuerKind=ClusterIssuer
You should see the cert-manager pod be re-created, and once started it should automatically create Certificate resources for all of your ingresses that previously had kube-lego enabled.
Before we finish, we should make sure there is now a Certificate resource for each ingress resource you previously enabled kube-lego on.
You should be able to check this by running:
$ kubectl get certificates --all-namespaces
There should be an entry for each ingress in your cluster with the kube-lego annotation.
We can also verify that cert-manager has 'adopted' the old TLS certificates by 'describing' one of these newly created certificates:
$ kubectl describe certificate my-example-certificate
...
Events:
Type Reason Age From Message
---- ------ ---- ---- -------
Normal RenewalScheduled 1m cert-manager-controller Certificate scheduled for renewal in 292 hours
Here we can see cert-manager has verified the existing TLS certificate and scheduled it to be renewed in 292h time.