cert-manager VS Caddy

cert-manager

The second one is a combination of tools: External DNS, cert-manager, and NGINX ingress. Using these as a stack, you can quickly deploy an application, making it available through a DNS with a TLS without much effort via simple annotations. When I first discovered External DNS, I was amazed at its quality.

On top of its core components, SpinKube depends on cert-manager. cert-Manager is responsible for provisioning and managing TLS certificates that are used by the admission webhook system of the Spin Operator. Let’s install cert-manager and KWasm using the commands shown here:

terraform { required_providers { kubectl = { source = "gavinbunney/kubectl" version = "1.14.0" } } } # The reference to the current project or a AWS project data "google_client_config" "provider" {} # The reference to the current cluster or EKS data "google_container_cluster" "my_cluster" { name = var.cluster_name location = var.cluster_location } # We configure the kubectl provider to use those values for authenticating provider "kubectl" { host = data.google_container_cluster.my_cluster.endpoint token = data.google_client_config.provider.access_token cluster_ca_certificate = base64decode(data.google_container_cluster.my_cluster.master_auth[0].cluster_ca_certificate) } #Download the multiple manifests file. data "http" "cert_manager_crds" { url = "https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v${var.cert_manager_version}/cert-manager.crds.yaml" } data "kubectl_file_documents" "cert_manager_crds" { content = data.http.cert_manager_crds.response_body lifecycle { precondition { condition = 200 == data.http.cert_manager_crds.status_code error_message = "Status code invalid" } } } # We use the for_each or else this kubectl_manifest will only import the first manifest in the file. resource "kubectl_manifest" "cert_manager_crds" { for_each = data.kubectl_file_documents.cert_manager_crds.manifests yaml_body = each.value }

SSL certificates thanks to Cloudflare and cert-manager

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/${CERT_MANAGER_VERSION}/cert-manager.crds.yaml

put the Sub-CA inside hashicorp vault to be used for automatic signing of services like https://cert-manager.io/ inside our k8s clusters.

install-cert-manager: desc: Install cert-manager deps: - init-cluster cmds: - kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/{{.CERT_MANAGER_VERSION}}/cert-manager.yaml - echo "Waiting for cert-manager to be ready" && sleep 25 status: - kubectl -n cert-manager get pods | grep Running | wc -l | grep -q 3

I've been pretty frustrated with how private CAs are supported. Your private root CA can be maliciously used to MITM every domain on the Internet, even though you intend to use it for only a couple domain names. Most people forget to set Name Constraints when they create these and many helper tools lack support [1][2]. Worse, browser support for Name Constraints has been slow [3] and support isn't well tracked [4]. Public CAs give you certificate transparency and you can subscribe to events to detect mis-issuance. Some hosted private CAs like AWS's offer logs [5], but DIY setups don't.

Even still, there are a lot of folks happily using private CAs, they aren't the target audience for this initial release.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/issues/302

[2] https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/issues/3655

[3] https://alexsci.com/blog/name-non-constraint/

[4] https://github.com/Netflix/bettertls/issues/19

[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/privateca/latest/userguide/secur...

the Cert Manager

However, it's very unlikely that .NET developers will directly expose their Kestrel-based web apps to the internet. Typically, we use other popular web servers like Nginx, Traefik, and Caddy to act as a reverse-proxy in front of Kestrel for various reasons:

I think that recompiling with upgraded Go will not solve the issue. It seems Caddy imports `golang.org/x/net/http2` and pins it to v0.22.0 which is vulnerable: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/6219#issuecommen....

Caddy [1] is a single binary. It is not minimal, but the size difference is barely noticeable.

serve also comes to mind. If you have node installed, `npx serve .` does exactly that.

There are a few go projects that fit your description, none of them very popular, probably because they end up being a 20-line wrapper around http frameworks just like this one.

[1] https://caddyserver.com/

Each app’s front end is built with Qwik and uses Tailwind for styling. The server-side is powered by Qwik City (Qwik’s official meta-framework) and runs on Node.js hosted on a shared Linode VPS. The apps also use PM2 for process management and Caddy as a reverse proxy and SSL provisioner. The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database that also runs on a shared Linode VPS. The apps interact with the database using Drizzle, an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) for JavaScript. The entire infrastructure for both apps is managed with Terraform using the Terraform Linode provider, which was new to me, but made provisioning and destroying infrastructure really fast and easy (once I learned how it all worked).

So I dug a little deeper and came across this gem: Caddy. Caddy is this fantastic, extensible, cross-platform, open-source web server that's written in Go. The best part? It comes with automatic HTTPS. It basically condenses all the work our scripts and manual maintenance were doing into just 4-5 lines of config. So, stick around and I'll walk you through how to set up an automatic SSL solution with Caddy, Docker and a Node.js server.

Let's use Caddy which can act as reverse-proxy with automatic HTTPS coverage.

Even if it may be simple, it doesn't handle edge cases such as https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/1632

I personally would make the trade off of taking on more complexity so that I can have extra compatibility.

One of the most heavily used Russian software projects on the internet https://www.nginx.com/blog/do-svidaniya-igor-thank-you-for-n... but it's only marginally more modern than Apache httpd.

In light of recently announced nginx memory-safety vulnerabilities I'd suggest migrating to Caddy https://caddyserver.com/

My preferred solution is using Caddy. This will resolve the networking issues, work as a great reverse proxy, and takes care of the whole SSL process for us. We can follow the install instructions from their documentation and run these five commands: