nginx-proxy VS cert-manager

I have an express API that runs on EC2 and I am using nginx-proxy

If Traefik is not your thing Im happily using https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy and sslip.io for local docker compose development.

And then even plain nginx to proxy to non docker services...

(And ipv6 for really short urls. E.g. `example.com.--1.sslip.io` etc)

I wanted to share with you an exciting new tool that simplifies the process of interacting with the NGINX Proxy Manager API. It's a TypeScript tool that generates API requests based on environment variables within a Docker container. This tool is heavy influenced by the https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy but it works with npm.

I use an automatically configuring reverse proxy - there's several to choose from, but the nginx-docker image is really nice, and comes with another image to do automatic SSL with certbot (if you wanted to host things externally).

Docker runs on the 3B+ so you could use this [Github] or the one I have deployed here [NGINX Proxy Manager site] amongst others.

- and this

docker compose + wildcard dns + reverse proxy that covers all widecard subdomains + https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy (not to be confused with nginx itself) then setup a container for each app and set a subdomain for it, you can add ssl if you have a public domain or use self signed certs (but you need to distribute it to all machines and devices)

setting up letsencrypt with nginx-proxy and acme-companion

We use the nginx-proxy docker image. Auto-configuring reverse proxy with support for certbot. Never been easier - just put your domain and certbot details in your container env, and it does the rest.

I just use the nginx-proxy image, makes it all super easy, auto-configuring, and all domain/cert information is stored against the project rather than the proxy.

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