How to launch nginx-ingress and cert-manager 0.6.2 in Kubernetes using AWS DNS Route53 Validation

At my job (in Fravega) we have been struggling for some days dealing with certificates. It turns out that we didn’t find an updated guide for this, so we decided to write our own.

Following this guide but with changes required for dns validation(needed for private ingress!) and to work with cert manager v0.6.2

This guide assumes that you have K8s cluster working with external dns and nginx-ingress-controller installed, the following steps are:

1. Install helm
2. Install cert manager
3. Create a user in AWS with route53 permissions
4. Create Staging ClusterIssuer with DNS validation
5. Create Certificate
6. Create a test Ingress

Install helm

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. It allows you to install packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources and publish them as charts.

If you have already installed and setup kubectl to access your cluster, you can easily install helm following this instruction.

Install Cert Manager