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Purpose

This repo demonstrates how to implement a TLS certificate in a local development k8s cluster.

There were a few issues I came across when I was integrating the current web app I'm working on with Azure AD and a few other web APIs:

  1. Needing https:// for redirect URLs.
  2. You can just provide a redirect URL of https://<minikube-ip>, but the browser "safety" warning messages due to an invalid certificate get pretty annoying.
  3. While you can implement TLS on an IP address--it isn't a common practice--it is prohibited on non-public IPs (e.g., 192.168.x.x), which is likely what minikube ip will provide.
  4. Most importantly: the need to encrypt data in transit when communicating with an external web API.

Revisions

4/27/21

Rewriting the process as it has now been simplified:

  • It used to involve using a minikube --driver= of the VM you prefer to use (hyperkit, kvm, hyperv, etc.). However, the prefered method has now become minikube --drive=docker and using minikube tunnel. It is more consistent across operating systems and involves fewer steps, but does require using an additional terminal for minikube tunnel to run.
  • It used to involve modifying the operating system's host file to map domain.local to the minikube ip. This is no longer necessary and just uses localhost.
  • These steps should work for macOS (Intel and M1), Windows and WSL2, and Linux.

Credit

I was able to sort this out in large part due to this blog post by Sébastien Dubois.

Overview

What we'll do to get this working is the following:

  1. Setting up our base project environment using (go to step):

    • react (create-react-app)
    • docker
    • kubectl
    • minikube
    • skaffold

  2. Once installed configuring the cluster (go to step):

    • Setting up minikube
    • Setting up ingress-nginx

  3. Spinning up the cluster with skaffold to make sure the cluster is working (go to step).

  4. Installing and adding a TLS certificate to the cluster (go to step):

    • Installing and setting up cert-manager
    • Installing and setting up mkcert

Setting up the project

Setting up the Base Project and Environment

Cloning the Repo

For brevity, you'll just want to clone what is basically just a fresh create-react-app application, Dockerfile.dev and .yaml config files:

# clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/cheslijones/tls-minikube.git

# change into the directory
cd tls-minikube

Installing docker

Please follow the directions for your operating system here.

Installing kubectl

If you are using a Docker Desktop version, it just needs to be enabled in the Docker Desktop GUI. You can also refer to installation instructions for your OS here.

Installing minikube

Please follow the directions for your operating system here.

Installing skaffold

Please follow the directions for your operating system here.

Summary

At the end of this, you should be able to type run the following commands and get a list of the acceptable sub-commands for each command.

# docker
docker run hello-world
# or
sudo docker run hello-world

# kubectl
kubectl version --client

# minikube
minikube

# skaffold
skaffold

If not, please refer to the documentation linked to above and follow the steps again.

Configuring the Cluster

Creating a minikube VM

It used to be preferred to use a VM driver like kvm, hyperkit, hyperv, etc., but using the docker driver tends to be more consistent across operating systems and doesn't require mapping the minikube ip to domain.local name in the host file.

Crete the minikube cluster with:

minikube start --vm-driver=docker

# or if you want to give the cluster a specific name to keep them separate
minikube start -p <cluster-name> --vm-driver=docker

Within several seconds to a minute, your minikube should be up and running.

Enable ingress-nginx in minikube

In the ingress-nginx documentation, you don't use the directions for minikube. Instead you use the Docker for Mac. It is counter-intuitive, but it does work whether you use Docker Desktop for Windows or macOS, or WSL2 and Linux:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/controller-v0.45.0/deploy/static/provider/cloud/deploy.yaml

Manifests

The repo comes with the ./ingress.yaml, ./k8s/client.yaml, ./client/Dockerfile.dev, and ./skaffold.yaml already configured. They will do the following:

  • ./ingress.yaml: This your ingress-nginx ingress controller configuration. It accepts traffic for our web application and then routes it to the appropriate running service.
  • ./k8s/client.yaml: This is the configuration for the create-react-app client deployment.
  • ./client/Dockerfile.dev: This is the docker configuration for how to build the client image.
  • ./skaffold.yaml: This configuration handles the building of the docker image and deploying to minikube.

Spinning up our Cluster

  1. To spin the cluster up, run the following command:

    skaffold dev

    It can take around a minute for the client image to be built and deployed in the cluster. When it is done, you should see something like the following:

    Starting deploy...
- ingress.networking.k8s.io/ingress-dev created
- deployment.apps/client-deployment-dev configured
- service/client-cluster-ip-service-dev configured
Waiting for deployments to stabilize...
- deployment/client-deployment-dev is ready.
Deployments stabilized in 2.347 seconds
Press Ctrl+C to exit
Watching for changes...
[client] 
[client] > [email protected] start /app
[client] > react-scripts start
[client] 
[client] ℹ ｢wds｣: Project is running at http://172.17.0.4/
[client] ℹ ｢wds｣: webpack output is served from 
[client] ℹ ｢wds｣: Content not from webpack is served from /app/public
[client] ℹ ｢wds｣: 404s will fallback to /
[client] Starting the development server...
[client] 
[client] Compiled successfully!
[client] 
[client] You can now view client in the browser.
[client] 
[client]   Local:            http://localhost:3000
[client]   On Your Network:  http://172.17.0.4:3000
[client] 
[client] Note that the development build is not optimized.
[client] To create a production build, use npm run build.
[client]

  2. In a separate terminal run the following command. You should be asked to provide your admin credentials:

    minikube tunnel

$ minikube tunnel -p $(basename $PWD)
❗  The service ingress-nginx-controller requires privileged ports to be exposed: [80 443]
🔑  sudo permission will be asked for it.
🏃  Starting tunnel for service ingress-nginx-controller.
[sudo] password for cheslijones:

  3. Now, in your browser of choice, navigate to http://localhost.

  4. If everything is working, you should be greeted by the running create-react-app application.

Great! So we know our application is being deployed correctly into minikube by skaffold. You can press CTRL + C to stop the cluster from running and skaffold will automatically stop the cluster.

Of course, if you try to go to https://localhost you'll be greeted with this:

Adding TLS certificate

Now we need to add the TLS certificate to address this error, and more importantly to encrypt our data in transit to external APIs.

Installing mkcert and

NOTE: The instructions are slightly different for WSL2.

For WSL2, you do need to use choco to install mkcert into Windows itself with cmd or PowerShell and not in WSL2.

mkcert, as the repo says, is a "... simple zero-config tool to make locally trusted development certificates with any names you'd like." It is, and does, just that.

Please refer to the documentation for instructions for your OS.

Generating Certificates

NOTE: The instructions are slightly different for WSL2.

For WSL2, you need to run mkcert -install in cmd or PowerShell which will add the certificates to C:\Users\<username>. You then need to copy these into your root project in WSL2.

Once installed, all you should need to do is the following:

$ mkcert -install
Created a new local CA 💥
The local CA is now installed in the system trust store! ⚡️
The local CA is now installed in the Firefox trust store (requires browser restart)! 🦊

$ mkcert localhost 127.0.0.1 ::1

Created a new certificate valid for the following names 📜
 - "localhost"
 - "127.0.0.1"
 - "::1"

The certificate is at "./localhost+2.pem" and the key at "./localhost+2-key.pem" ✅

You'll see that localhost+2-key.pem and localhost+2.pem have been created in your project's root directory.

Installing cert-manager

Next, we need to install cert-manager using one of the following commands:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.3.1/cert-manager.yaml

Run the following command to make sure the related Pods have been created and do not continue until they have.

$ kubectl get pods --namespace cert-manager
NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
cert-manager-86548b886-wcl6r               1/1     Running   0          29s
cert-manager-cainjector-6d59c8d4f7-hws49   1/1     Running   0          29s
cert-manager-webhook-578954cdd-hn749       1/1     Running   0          29s

When READY is 1/1 for all three, you can continue.

Adding the Certficates to k8s Secrets

The .pem files that were created need to be added to our k8s cluster secrets:

kubectl create secret tls tls-localhost-dev --key=localhost+2-key.pem --cert=localhost+2.pem

You should see the following if successful:

secret/tls-localhost-dev created

.pem Warning

DO NOT COMMIT THESE. Either add *.pem to .gitignore or just delete them as they are not needed after the previous step.

The tls.yaml File

We need to apply the tls.yaml manifest to our cluster now so that the certificate can be aquired and added to all traffic:

kubectl apply -f k8s/tls.yaml

If successful, you should see:

issuer.cert-manager.io/letsencrypt-dev-issuer created
certificate.cert-manager.io/letsencrypt-dev-certificate created

Finally....

Run skaffold dev again.

Navigate to localhost and if everything was done correctly, you should automatically be directed to https://localhost and have no warning messages from your browser.

Questions, Issues and Feedback

Please create an issue if you have any questions, issues running the repo, or have feedback on how I can improve this repo or correct something that is wrong. I'm always looking for ways to improve.