This project supports automatically getting a certificate for OpenShift routes from any cert-manager Issuer.

1. Ensure you have cert-manager installed through the method of your choice. But make sure you install cert-manager and openshift-routes-deployment in the same namespace. By default this is in the namespace cert-manager. For example, with the regular manifest:

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

Both ClusterIssuer and namespace based Issuer are possible. Here a ClusterIssuer is used:

2. For example, create the ClusterIssuer (no additional ingress class is needed for the openshift-ingress router. The example.com email must be replaced by another one):

apiVersion: v1
items:
- apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
  kind: ClusterIssuer
  metadata:
    annotations:
    name: letsencrypt-prod
  spec:
    acme:
      email: [email protected]
      preferredChain: ""
      privateKeySecretRef:
        name: letsencrypt-prod
      server: https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
      solvers:
      - http01:
          ingress: {}

oc apply -f clusterissuer.yaml

3. Make sure that there is an A record on the load balancer IP or a CNAME record on the load balancer hostname in your DNS system for the HTTP-01 subdomain.

CNAME:
  Name: *.service.clustername.domain.com
  Alias: your-lb-domain.cloud

Install in your cluster using the static manifests:

oc apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/openshift-routes/releases/latest/download/cert-manager-openshift-routes.yaml

If you follow the above prerequisites, use this annotations below

...
metadata:
  annotations:
    cert-manager.io/issuer-kind: ClusterIssuer
    cert-manager.io/issuer-name: letsencrypt-prod
...
spec:
  host: app.service.clustername.domain.com
...

Annotate your routes:

apiVersion: route.openshift.io/v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: example-route
  annotations:
    cert-manager.io/issuer-name: my-issuer # This is the only required annotation
    cert-manager.io/issuer-group: cert-manager.io # Optional, defaults to cert-manager.io
    cert-manager.io/issuer-kind: Issuer # Optional, defaults to Issuer, could be ClusterIssuer or an External Issuer
    cert-manager.io/duration: 1h # Optional, defaults to 90 days
    cert-manager.io/renew-before: 30m # Optional, defaults to 1/3 of total certificate duration.
    cert-manager.io/common-name: "My Certificate" # Optional, no default.
    cert-manager.io/alt-names: "mycooldomain.com,mysecondarydomain.com" # Optional, no default
    cert-manager.io/ip-sans: "10.20.30.40,192.168.192.168" # Optional, no default
    cert-manager.io/uri-sans: "spiffe://trustdomain/workload" # Optional, no default
spec:
  host: app.service.clustername.domain.com # will be added to the Subject Alternative Names of the CertificateRequest
  port:
    targetPort: 8080
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: hello-openshift

Observe the route.Spec.TLS section of your route being populated automatically by cert-manager.

The route's TLS certificate will be rotated 2/3 of the way through the certificate's lifetime, or cert-manager.io/renew-before time before it expires.

Now the website can be called: https://app.service.clustername.domain.com

The source code for the controller can be found in the ./internal/ folder. After modifying the source code, you can execute the tests with:

go test ./...

We do not wish to support non Kubernetes (or kubernetes-sigs) APIs in cert-manager core. This adds a large maintenance burden, and it's hard for us to e2e test everyone's CRDs. However, OpenShift is widely used, so it makes sense to have some support for it in the cert-manager ecosystem.

Ideally we would have contributed this controller to an existing project, e.g. https://github.com/redhat-cop/cert-utils-operator. Unfortunately, cert-manager is not really designed to be imported as a module. It has a large number of transitive dependencies that would add an unfair amount of maintenance to whichever project we submitted it to. In the future, we would like to split the cert-manager APIs and typed clients out of the main cert-manager repo, at which point it would be easier for other people to consume in their projects.