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cert-manager allows you to enable HTTPS on your Coder installation, regardless of whether you're using Let's Encrypt or you have your own certificate authority.

This guide is for Coder v1.21.0 and later, which handle certificates differently from earlier versions of Coder. Ensure that you're reading the docs applicable to your Coder version.

This guide will show you how to install cert-manager and set up your cluster to issue Let's Encrypt certificates for your Coder installation so that you can enable HTTPS on your Coder deployment. It will also show you how to configure your Coder hostname and dev URLs.

Prerequisites

You must have:

You should also:

  • Be a cluster admin
  • Have access to your DNS provider
  • Have an AWS account so that you can access Route 53 and IAM

Step 1: Add cert-manager to your Kubernetes cluster

  1. Install cert-manager:

    kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.8.0/cert-manager.yaml

  2. Check that cert-manager installs correctly by running

    kubectl get CustomResourceDefinition | grep cert-manager

    You should see certificates, certificate requests, challenges, cluster issuers, issuers, and orders.

  3. Next, check that your services are running in the cert-manager namespace

    kubectl get all -n cert-manager

NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
cert-manager-7cd5cdf774-vb2pr              1/1     Running   0          84s
cert-manager-cainjector-6546bf7765-ssxhf   1/1     Running   0          84s
cert-manager-webhook-7f68b65458-zvzn9      1/1     Running   0          84s

Step 2: Delegate your domain names and set up DNS01 challenges

Because Coder dynamically generates domains (specifically the dev URLs), your certificates need to be approved and challenged. The following steps will show you how to use Route 53 for DNS01 challenges.

If your domain name is managed by Route 53, the hosted zone will already exist so skip to step 3.

  1. Log in to AWS Route 53. On the Dashboard, click Hosted Zone.

  2. Click Create Hosted Zone. In the configuration screen, provide the Domain name that you'll use for Coder (e.g., coder.exampleCo.com) and make sure that you've selected Public hosted zone. Click Create hosted zone to proceed.

    When your list of hosted zones refreshes, you'll see that your new records includes multiple values under Value/Route traffic to.

  3. Log in to your DNS provider so that you can edit your NS records.

  4. Edit your NS record to delegate your zones to AWS by sending each of the values under Value/Route traffic to to your domain name (i.e., delegate ns-X.awsdns-32.net to coder.exampleCo.com).

Step 3: Create an IAM role for clusterIssuer

To make sure that your clusterIssuer can change your DNS settings, create the required IAM role

When you create the secret for cert-manager, referenced below as route53-credentials, be sure it is in the cert-manager namespace since it's used by the cert-manager pod to perform DNS configuration changes:

kubectl --namespace cert-manager \
create secret generic route53-credentials \
--from-literal="secret-access-key=<YOUR-AWS-SECRET-ACCESS-KEY>"

Step 4: Create the ACME Issuer

  1. Using the text editor of your choice, create a new configuration file called letsencrypt.yaml (you can name it whatever you'd like) that includes your newly created IAM role:

    apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: ClusterIssuer
metadata:
  name: letsencrypt
spec:
  acme:
    email: [email protected]
    preferredChain: ""
    privateKeySecretRef:
      name: example-issuer-account-key
    server: https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
    solvers:
      - dns01:
          route53:
            accessKeyID: your-access-key-ID #secret with IAM Role
            region: your-region
            secretAccessKeySecretRef:
              key: secret-access-key
              name: route53-credentials
        selector:
          dnsZones:
            - yourDomain.com

    More information on the values in the YAML file above can be found in the dns01 solver configuration documentation.

  2. Apply your configuration changes

    kubectl apply -f letsencrypt.yaml

    If successful, you'll see a response similar to

    clusterissuer.cert-manager.io/letsencrypt created

Step 5: Create a certificate

Note: If you are providing an ingress, certificates can be automatically created with an ingress annotation. See the cert-manager docs for details. If you are unsure whether you are using an ingress or not, continue with this step.

In a text editor, create a new file called certificate.yaml and paste the following:

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
  name: coder-certs
  namespace: coder # Your Coder deployment namespace
spec:
  commonName: "*.coder.example.com"
  dnsNames:
    - "coder.example.com"
    - "*.coder.example.com"
  issuerRef:
    kind: ClusterIssuer
    name: letsencrypt
  secretName: coder-certs

Be sure to change coder.example.com to the domain for your Coder deployment. While this example uses a single domain, a separate domain can be created for dev URLs or even omitted if you do not have dev URLs enabled.

Once you're done, deploy the certificates.

kubectl apply -f certificate.yaml

Step 5: Install/upgrade Coder

At this point, you're ready to install Coder. However, to use all of the functionality you set up in this tutorial, use the following command instead:

# be sure to update the `stringValue` placeholder with the
# proper value for your devurlsHostSecretName and hostSecretName

helm upgrade --install coder coder/coder --namespace coder \
  --version=<CODER_VERSION> \
  --set coderd.devurlsHost="*.coder.example.com" \
  --set coderd.tls.devurlsHostSecretName="coder-certs-stringValue" \
  --set coderd.tls.hostSecretName="coder-certs-stringValue" \
  --wait

The hostSecretName and devurlsHostSecretName are arbitrary strings that you should set to some value that does not conflict with any other secrets in the Coder namespace.

There are also a few additional steps to make sure that your hostname and dev URLs work.

  1. Check the contents of your namespace:

    kubectl get all -n <your_namespace> -o wide

    Find the service/coderd line, and copy the external IP value shown.

  2. Return to Route53 and go to Hosted Zone.

  3. Create a new record for your hostname; provide coder as the record name and paste the external IP as the value. Save.

  4. Create another record for your dev URLs: set it to *.dev.exampleCo or similar and use the same external IP as the previous step for value. Save.

At this point, you can return to step 6 of the installation guide to obtain the admin credentials you need to log in. If you are not getting a valid certificate after redeploying, see cert-manager's troubleshooting guide for additional assistance.

Troubleshooting

If you are not getting a valid certificate after redeploying, see cert-manager's troubleshooting guide for additional assistance.

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