Tag: istio

These are steps to easily install TLS certs to a Kubernetes cluster with Istio service mesh as ingress controller, provided by Let’s Encrypt‘s awesome certbot.

Installation of the certbot (on Ubuntu Linux 20.04LTS)

The certbot can be install via snap on Ubuntu Linux

sudo snap install --classic certbot
sudo ln -s /snap/bin/certbot /usr/local/bin/certbot
certbot --version
certbot 1.15.0

By default certbot needs to write to system directories which I thought unnecessary. I use this alias to run certbot as a normal user

mkdir ~/.certbot
alias certbot="certbot --config-dir ~/.certbot/ --work-dir ~/.certbot/ --logs-dir ~/.certbot"

Generate a new cert

Here’s an example to use certbot’s plugin to create certificate for domains hosted at CloudFlare. Here for more info on the plugin.

# install the plugin first
sudo snap set certbot trust-plugin-with-root=ok
sudo snap install certbot-dns-cloudflare

# save a cloudflare API token
echo "dns_cloudflare_api_token = xxxx" > ~/.cloudflare.ini

# generate the cert
# cert and key will be in ~/.certbot/live/raynix.info
certbot certonly --dns-cloudflare -d raynix.info -d '*.raynix.info' --dns-cloudflare-credentials ~/.cloudflare.ini
ls ~/.certbot/live/raynix.info/ -lht
total 4.0K
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ray ray 692 May 10 11:52 README
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ray ray  35 May 10 11:52 cert.pem -> ../../archive/raynix.info/cert1.pem
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ray ray  36 May 10 11:52 chain.pem -> ../../archive/raynix.info/chain1.pem
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ray ray  40 May 10 11:52 fullchain.pem -> ../../archive/raynix.info/fullchain1.pem
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ray ray  38 May 10 11:52 privkey.pem -> ../../archive/raynix.info/privkey1.pem

Install the cert to an Istio gateway

The cert and the key will be put into a Kubernetes secret in istio-system namespace

# assuming kubectl is installed and configured
kubectl create secret -n istio-system tls wild-cert --key ~/.certbot/live/raynix.info/privkey.pem --cert ~/.certbot/live/raynix.info/fullchain.pem

Now the Istio gateway object needs to use this secret as TLS credential

cat <<EOF >gw.yaml
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: wordpress-gateway
  namespace: wordpress
spec:
  selector:
    # default istio ingress gateway
    istio: ingressgateway
  servers:
  - hosts:
    - raynix.info
    port:
      name: https
      number: 443
      protocol: HTTPS
    tls:
      credentialName: wild-cert
      mode: SIMPLE
  - hosts:
    - raynix.info
    port:
      name: http
      number: 80
      protocol: HTTP
    tls:
      httpsRedirect: true

Then this can be locally tested with curl

curl -v -HHost:raynix.info --resolve "raynix.info:<TLS node port>:<node IP>" "https://raynix.info:<TLS node port>"

🙂