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The cert-manager Command Line Tool (cmctl)

cmctl is a command line tool that can help you manage cert-manager and its resources inside your cluster.

📢 The cert-manager CLI is moving to a new GitHub repository

The cert-manager team have decided to move the cmctl code to a new GitHub repository. This will allow us to release new features and bug fixes for cmctl independently of cert-manager. It will simplify the Go package dependencies of cert-manager so there should be fewer security patch releases of cert-manager. It will make it easier for us to extend cmctl with features for managing trust-manager and approver-policy. And it will allow us to write more E2E tests for cmctl without further slowing down the test suite of cert-manager.

⚠️ cert-manager 1.14 is the last release that will still include a cert-manager-ctl container image, go package and GitHub release binary.

Visit the new cmctl repository on GitHub to find out more.

Installation

Homebrew

On Mac or Linux if you have Homebrew installed, you can install cmctl with:

brew install cmctl

This will also install shell completion.

Manual Installation

You need the cmctl file for the platform you're using, these can be found on our cmctl GitHub releases page. In order to use cmctl you need its binary to be accessible under the name cmctl in your $PATH. Run the following commands to set up the CLI. Replace OS and ARCH with your systems equivalents:

OS=$(go env GOOS); ARCH=$(go env GOARCH); curl -fsSL -o cmctl https://github.com/cert-manager/cmctl/releases/latest/download/cmctl_${OS}_${ARCH}
chmod +x cmctl
sudo mv cmctl /usr/local/bin

Alternatively, you can install cmctl using go:

go install github.com/cert-manager/cmctl/v2@latest

You can run cmctl help to test the CLI is set up properly:

$ cmctl help


cmctl is a CLI tool manage and configure cert-manager resources for Kubernetes


Usage: cmctl [command]


Available Commands:
  approve      Approve a CertificateRequest
  check        Check cert-manager components
  completion   Generate completion scripts for the cert-manager CLI
  convert      Convert cert-manager config files between different API versions
  create       Create cert-manager resources
  deny         Deny a CertificateRequest
  experimental Interact with experimental features
  help         Help about any command
  inspect      Get details on certificate related resources
  renew        Mark a Certificate for manual renewal
  status       Get details on current status of cert-manager resources
  upgrade      Tools that assist in upgrading cert-manager
  version      Print the cert-manager CLI version and the deployed cert-manager version


Flags:
  -h, --help                           help for cmctl
      --log-flush-frequency duration   Maximum number of seconds between log flushes (default 5s)


Use "cmctl [command] --help" for more information about a command.

There is also a legacy kubectl plugin, but it is no longer recommended because the standalone cmctl binary provides better auto-completion.

Commands

Approve and Deny CertificateRequests

CertificateRequests can be approved or denied using their respective cmctl commands:

Note: The internal cert-manager approver may automatically approve all CertificateRequests unless disabled with the flag on the cert-manager-controller --controllers=*,-certificaterequests-approver

$ cmctl approve -n istio-system mesh-ca --reason "pki-team" --message "this certificate is valid"
Approved CertificateRequest 'istio-system/mesh-ca'
$ cmctl deny -n my-app my-app --reason "example.com" --message "violates policy"
Denied CertificateRequest 'my-app/my-app'

Convert

cmctl convert can be used to convert cert-manager manifest files between different API versions. Both YAML and JSON formats are accepted. The command either takes a file name, directory path, or a URL as input. The contents is converted into the format of the latest API version known to cert-manager, or the one specified by --output-version flag.

The default output will be printed to stdout in YAML format. One can use the option -o to change the output destination.

For example, this will output cert.yaml in the latest API version:

cmctl convert -f cert.yaml

Create

cmctl create can be used to create cert-manager resources manually. Sub-commands are available to create different resources:

CertificateRequest

To create a cert-manager CertificateRequest, use cmctl create certificaterequest. The command takes in the name of the CertificateRequest to be created, and creates a new CertificateRequest resource based on the YAML manifest of a Certificate resource as specified by --from-certificate-file flag, by generating a private key locally and creating a 'certificate signing request' to be submitted to a cert-manager Issuer. The private key will be written to a local file, where the default is <name_of_cr>.key, or it can be specified using the --output-key-file flag.

If you wish to wait for the CertificateRequest to be signed and store the X.509 certificate in a file, you can set the --fetch-certificate flag. The default timeout when waiting for the issuance of the certificate is 5 minutes, but can be specified with the --timeout flag. The default name of the file storing the X.509 certificate is <name_of_cr>.crt, you can use the --output-certificate-file flag to specify otherwise.

Note that the private key and the X.509 certificate are both written to file, and are not stored inside Kubernetes.

For example this will create a CertificateRequest resource with the name "my-cr" based on the cert-manager Certificate described in my-certificate.yaml while storing the private key and X.509 certificate in my-cr.key and my-cr.crt respectively.

cmctl create certificaterequest my-cr --from-certificate-file my-certificate.yaml --fetch-certificate --timeout 20m

Renew

cmctl allows you to manually trigger a renewal of a specific certificate. This can be done either one certificate at a time, using label selectors (-l app=example), or with the --all flag:

For example, you can renew the certificate example-com-tls:

$ kubectl get certificate
NAME                       READY   SECRET               AGE
example-com-tls            True    example-com-tls      1d


$ cmctl renew example-com-tls
Manually triggered issuance of Certificate default/example-com-tls


$ kubectl get certificaterequest
NAME                              READY   AGE
example-com-tls-tls-8rbv2         False    10s

You can also renew all certificates in a given namespace:

$ cmctl renew --namespace=app --all

The renew command allows several options to be specified:

  • --all renew all Certificates in the given Namespace, or all namespaces when combined with --all-namespaces
  • -A or --all-namespaces mark Certificates across namespaces for renewal
  • -l --selector allows set a label query to filter on as well as kubectl like global flags like --context and --namespace.

Status Certificate

cmctl status certificate outputs the details of the current status of a Certificate resource and related resources like CertificateRequest, Secret, Issuer, as well as Order and Challenges if it is a ACME Certificate. The command outputs information about the resources, including Conditions, Events and resource specific fields like Key Usages and Extended Key Usages of the Secret or Authorizations of the Order. This will be helpful for troubleshooting a Certificate.

The command takes in one argument specifying the name of the Certificate resource and the namespace can be specified as usual with the -n or --namespace flag.

This example queries the status of the Certificate named my-certificate in namespace my-namespace.

cmctl status certificate my-certificate -n my-namespace

Completion

cmctl supports auto-completion for both subcommands as well as suggestions for runtime objects.

$ cmctl approve -n <TAB> <TAB>
default             kube-node-lease     kube-public         kube-system         local-path-storage

Completion can be installed for your environment by following the instructions for the shell you are using. It currently supports bash, fish, zsh, and powershell.

$ cmctl completion help

Experimental

cmctl x has experimental sub-commands for operations which are currently under evaluation to be included into cert-manager proper. The behavior and interface of these commands are subject to change or removal in future releases.

Create

cmctl x create can be used to create cert-manager resources manually. Sub-commands are available to create different resources:

CertificateSigningRequest

To create a CertificateSigningRequest, use

cmctl x create csr

This command takes the name of the CertificateSigningRequest to be created, as well as a file containing a Certificate manifest (-f, --from-certificate-file). This command will generate a private key, based on the options of the Certificate, and write it to the local file <name>.key, or specified by -k, --output-key-file.

$ cmctl x create csr -f my-cert.yaml my-req

cert-manager will not automatically approve CertificateSigningRequests. If you are not running a custom approver in your cluster, you will likely need to manually approve the CertificateSigningRequest:

$ kubectl certificate approve <name>

This command can also wait for the CertificateSigningRequest to be signed using the flag -w, --fetch-certificate. Once signed it will write the resulting signed certificate to the local file <name>.crt, or specified by -c, --output-certificate-file.

$ cmctl x create csr -f my-cert.yaml my-req -w

Install

cmctl x install

This command makes sure that the required CustomResourceDefinitions are installed together with the cert-manager, cainjector and webhook components. Under the hood, a procedure similar to the Helm install procedure is used.

You can also use cmctl x install to customize the installation of cert-manager.

The example below shows how to tune the cert-manager installation by overriding the default Helm values:

cmctl x install \
    --set prometheus.enabled=false \  # Example: disabling prometheus using a Helm parameter
    --set webhook.timeoutSeconds=4s   # Example: changing the wehbook timeout using a Helm parameter

You can find a full list of the install parameters on cert-manager's ArtifactHub page. These are the same parameters that are available when using the Helm chart. Once you have deployed cert-manager, you can verify the installation.

The CLI also allows the user to output the templated manifest to stdout, instead of installing the manifest on the cluster.

cmctl x install --dry-run > cert-manager.custom.yaml

Uninstall

cmctl x uninstall

This command uninstalls any Helm-managed release of cert-manager.

Starting from cmctl v2.0.0, the uninstall command is safe and will not delete the CRDs by default, even if they were installed with the Helm chart (using the option --set installCRDs=true).

🕐 Before v2.0.0, cmctl would remove the CRDs if they were installed with the Helm chart (similar to Helm's behavior).

Most of the features supported by helm uninstall are also supported by this command.

Some example uses:

cmctl x uninstall


cmctl x uninstall --namespace my-cert-manager


cmctl x uninstall --dry-run

Upgrade

Tools that assist in upgrading cert-manager

$ cmctl upgrade --help
Migrate API version

This command can be used to prepare a cert-manager installation that was created before cert-manager v1 for upgrading to a cert-manager version v1.6 or later. It ensures that any cert-manager custom resources that may have been stored in etcd at a deprecated API version get migrated to v1. See Migrating Deprecated API Resources for more context.

$ cmctl upgrade migrate-api-version --qps 5 --burst 10

Kubectl plugin

Since kubectl 1.26, kubectl plugins support auto-completion, which means you will have the same experience with the standalone cmctl binary and with the kubectl plugin.

To install the plugin you need the kubectl_cert-manager file for the platform you're using, these can be found on our cmctl GitHub releases page. In order to use the kubectl plugin you need its binary to be accessible under the name kubectl-cert_manager in your $PATH.

You can run kubectl cert-manager help to test that the plugin is set up properly.

Auto-completion with the kubectl plugin

Since kubectl 1.26, it is possible to enable auto-completion for plugins. Assuming that you installed kubectl_cert-manager in /usr/local/bin, you can set up auto-completion by running the following command:

cat >kubectl_complete-cert_manager <<'EOF'
#!/usr/bin/env sh
kubectl cert-manager __complete "$@"
EOF
sudo install kubectl_complete-cert_manager /usr/local/bin