Install and upgrade cert-manager

Starting at Kubernetes version v1.26, our default configured clusters are delivered without cert-manager.

This guide will assist you get a working up to date cert-manager and provide instructions for how to upgrade and delete it. Running your own is useful if you want to have full control.

The guide is based on cert-manager Helm chart, found here. We draw advantage of the option to install CRDs with kubectl, as recommended for a production setup.

Prerequisites

Helm needs to be provided with the correct repository:

1. Setup helm repo

   helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io --force-update
   

2. Verify you do not have a namespace named elx-cert-manager as you first need to remove some resources.

   kubectl -n elx-cert-manager delete svc cert-manager cert-manager-webhook
   kubectl -n elx-cert-manager delete deployments.apps cert-manager cert-manager-cainjector cert-manager-webhook
   kubectl delete namespace elx-cert-manager
   

Install

1. Prepare and install CRDs run:

   kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.4/cert-manager.crds.yaml
   

2. Run Helm install:

   helm install \
     cert-manager jetstack/cert-manager \
     --namespace cert-manager \
     --create-namespace \
     --version v1.14.4 \
   

   A full list of available Helm values is on cert-manager’s ArtifactHub page.

3. Verify the installation: Done with cmctl (cert-manager CLI https://cert-manager.io/docs/reference/cmctl/#installation).

   cmctl check api
   

   If everything is working you should get this message The cert-manager API is ready.

Upgrade

The setup used above is referenced in the topic “CRDs managed separately”.

In these examples <version> is “v1.14.4”.

1. Update CRDS:

   kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/<version>/cert-manager.crds.yaml
   

2. Update the Helm chart:

   helm upgrade cert-manager jetstack/cert-manager --namespace cert-manager --version v1.14.4 
   

Uninstall

To uninstall, use the guide here.