Migrating from Kube-LEGO

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 favor of this project. There are a number of key differences between the two:

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:

1. Scaled down and removed kube-lego

2. Installed cert-manager

3. Migrated ACME private key to cert-manager

4. Created an ACME ClusterIssuer using this private key, to issue certificates throughout your cluster

5. Configured cert-manager’s 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

6. Verified that the cert-manager installation is working

1. Scale down kube-lego

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

2. Deploy cert-manager

cert-manager should be deployed using Helm, according to our official installation 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!

3. Obtaining your ACME account private key

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 cert-manager namespace. By default, cert-manager stores supporting resources for ClusterIssuers in the namespace that it is running in, and we used cert-manager 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 cert-manager

4. Creating an ACME ClusterIssuer using your old ACME account

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 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: cert-manager.io/v1
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
    solvers:
    - http01:
        ingress:
          class: nginx

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
...
Status:
  Acme:
    Uri:  https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/acme/acct/7571319
  Conditions:
    Last Transition Time:  2019-01-30T14:52:03Z
    Message:               The ACME account was registered with the ACME server
    Reason:                ACMEAccountRegistered
    Status:                True
    Type:                  Ready

5. Configuring ingress-shim to use our new ClusterIssuer by default

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 in the docs, 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 \
     jetstack/cert-manager \
     --namespace cert-manager \
     --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.

6. Verify each ingress now has a corresponding Certificate

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 viewing the logs for cert-manager:

$ kubectl logs -n cert-manager -l app=cert-manager -c cert-manager
...
I1025 21:54:02.869269       1 sync.go:206] Certificate my-example-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 292 hours time.