certmgr

certmgr is a tool for managing certificates using CFSSL. It does the following:

• Ensures certificates are present.
• Renews certificates before they expire.
• Triggering a service reload or restart on certificate updates.

It operates on certificate specs, which are JSON files containing the information needed to generate a certificate. These are currently JSON due to the way CFSSL works; a future update can add YAML tags to the relevant CFSSL structures to allow these to be YAML files.

If a certificate can't be renewed (i.e. there's a problem talking to the CA), the certificate is kept in the renewal queue and will be attempted later.

When run without any subcommands, certmgr will start monitoring certificates. The configuration and specifications can be validated using the check subcommand.

Note: due to a bug in the os/user package, certmgr requires Go 1.9 or later to use the user/group functionality in file specifications.

Web server

When appropriately configured, certmgr will start a web server that has the following endpoints:

• / is a basic overview page with links to the other endpoints and a snapshot of the current metrics values.
• /metrics is the Prometheus endpoint (see the Metrics section).
• /debug/pprof is a net/http/pprof endpoint.

In the configuration file, the index_extra_html may contain HTML that will be inserted at the top of the file, after the server start time and current host:port.

Metrics

The following metrics are collected by Prometheus:

• cert_watching (counter): this is the number of certificates being watched by certmgr.
• cert_renewal_queue (gauge): this is the current number of certificates waiting to be renewed.
• cert_next_expires (gauge): this contains the number of hours to the next certificate expiration.
• cert_renewal_failures (counter): this counts the number of failures to renew a certificate.

certmgr.yaml

The configuration file is a YAML file; it is expected to be in /etc/certmgr/certmgr.yaml. The location can be changed using the -f flag.

An example certmgr.yaml file is:

dir: /etc/certmgr.d
default_remote: ca.example.net:8888
svcmgr: systemd
before: 72h
interval: 30m

metrics_port: 8080
metrics_address: localhost

index_extra_html: |
  <hr>
  <p>Links:</p>
  <ul>
    <li><strong><a href="https://internal.corp/sys/certmgr/runbook">Service runbook</a></strong></li>
	<li><a href="https://internal.corp/sys/certmgr">Component homepage</a></li>
	<li><a href="https://internal.corp/sys/ca">Internal CA documentation</a></li>
	<li><a href="https://certs.prometheus.internal.corp/alerts">Current TLS-related alerts</a></li>
  </ul>
  <hr>

This contains all of the currently available parameters:

• dir: this specifies the directory containing the certificate specs
• svcmgr: this specifies the service manager to use for restarting or reloading services. This can be systemd (using systemctl), sysv (using service), circus (using circusctl), or dummy (no restart/reload behavior).
• before: this is the interval before a certificate expires to start attempting to renew it.
• interval: this controls how often to check certificate expirations and how often to update the cert_next_expires metric.
• metrics_address: specifies the address for the Prometheus HTTP endpoint.
• metrics_port: specifies the port for the Prometheus HTTP endpoint.
• index_extra_html: specifies additional links that may be site-specific (such as the runbook) for the service index page.

Certificate Specs

An example certificate spec:

{
    "service": "nginx",
    "action": "restart",
    "request": {
        "CN": "www.example.net",
        "hosts": [
            "example.net",
            "www.example.net"
        ],
        "key": {
            "algo": "ecdsa",
            "size": 521
        },
        "names": [
            {
                "C": "US",
                "ST": "CA",
                "L": "San Francisco",
                "O": "Example, LLC"
            }
        ]
    },
    "private_key": {
        "path": "/etc/ssl/private/www.key",
        "owner": "www-data",
        "group": "www-data",
        "mode": "0600"
    },
    "certificate": {
        "path": "/home/kyle/tmp/certmgr/certs/test1.pem",
        "owner": "www-data",
        "group": "www-data"
    },
    "authority": {
        "remote": "ca.example.net:8888",
        "auth_key": "012345678012345678",
        "label": "www_ca",
        "profile": "three-month",
        "file": {
            "path": "/etc/myservice/ca.pem",
            "owner": "www-data",
            "group": "www-data"
        }
    }
}

A certificate spec has the following fields:

• service: this is optional, and names the service that the action should be applied to.
• action: this is optional, and may be one of "restart", "reload", or "nop".
• request: a CFSSL certificate request (see below).
• private_key and certificate: file specifications (see below) for the private key and certificate.
• authority: contains the CFSSL CA configuration (see below).

File specifications contain the following fields:

• path: this is required, and is the path to store the file.
• owner: this is optional; if it's not provided, the current user is used.
• group: this is optional; if it's not provided, the primary group of the current user is used.
• mode: this is optional; if it's not provided, "0644" will be used. It should be a numeric file mode.

CFSSL certificate requests have the following fields:

• CN: this contains the common name for the certificate.
• hosts: this is a list of SANs and/or IP addresses for the certificate.
• key: this is optional; it should contain an "algo" of either "rsa" or "ecdsa" and a "size" appropriate for the chosen algorithm. Recommendations are "rsa" and 2048 or "ecdsa" and 256. The default is "ecdsa" and 256.
• names: contains PKIX name information, including the "C" (country), "ST" (state), "L" (locality/city), "O" (organisation), and "OU" (organisational unit) fields.

The CA specification contains the following fields:

• remote: the CA to use. If not provided, the default remote from the config file is used.
• auth_key: the authentication key used to request a certificate.
• label: the CA to use for the certificate.
• profile: the CA profile that should be used.
• file: if this is included, the CA certificate will be saved here. It follows the same file specification format above.

Subcommands

In addition to the certificate manager, there are a few utility functions specified:

• check: validates the configuration file and all the certificate specs available in the certificate spec directory.
• clean: removes all of the certificates and private keys specified by the certificate specs.
• ensure: attempts to load all certificate specs, and ensure that the TLS key pairs they identify exist, are valid, and that they are up-to-date.
• genconfig: generates a default configuration file and ensures the default service directory exists.
• version: prints certificate manager's version, the version of Go it was built with, and shows the current configuration.

See also

The certmgr spec is included as SPEC.rst.