The deployment has a domain of its own now, which is the first time a
public certificate has been possible here at all. The registry issuer
beside this one explains why: nip.io is not on the public suffix list and
every *.nip.io certificate shares one rate limit, so Let's Encrypt could
never serve the addresses this cluster has been using.
DNS-01 rather than HTTP-01, because every deployed app lives at
<app>.apps.<domain> and only a DNS-01 challenge can issue the wildcard
that covers all of them. HTTP-01 would mean a certificate per app,
requested the moment each one is created.
Two issuers, staging and production. Production allows five duplicate
certificates a week and a failing solver spends that allowance without
issuing anything, which can lock a domain out of certificates for days.
Staging has no meaningful limit and issues from an untrusted root, so a
browser warning is the signal that the plumbing works. Move to the
production issuer once a staging certificate appears.
The token reaches cert-manager the same way every other credential here
does: Vault, through External Secrets. It wants Zone -> DNS -> Edit on the
one zone and nothing else — enough to write the TXT record a challenge
needs, and no more. Until `vault kv put secret/cloudflare/dns-token` has
run, the ExternalSecret stays unfulfilled and the issuers cannot register.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LEsTefWWifp4ikvhHF5s6N
