# cert-issuance — A Certificate is not Ready (ACME issuance is failing)

**Alert:** `CertificateNotReady` (warning, 1h)
**File:** `platform/monitoring/alerts.yaml`, group `platform-health.certificates`
**Expression:** `certmanager_certificate_ready_status{condition="False"} == 1`

## What this means here

cert-manager cannot issue or renew a certificate. The one that matters is `wildcard-home` in the
`gateway` namespace — secret `wildcard-home-tls`, requesting **both** `*.${BASE_DOMAIN}` **and**
`${BASE_DOMAIN}` from `${ACME_CLUSTER_ISSUER}` (`letsencrypt-prod` on prod). Every HTTPS listener on the
shared Gateway terminates with it, so issuance failing is a slow-burning cluster-wide outage: it does
nothing today and takes down every hostname plus in-cluster SSO when the existing certificate expires.
The 1h `for` reflects that — a failing order is worth investigating today, not paging at 3am.

The solver is **DNS-01 against Cloudflare**, which matters because DNS-01 has a failure mode this
cluster has already hit:

**The self-check, not the challenge, is the usual failure.** On 2026-08-16 the wildcard stalled with the
challenge at `Presented=true` — the Cloudflare TXT record *was* created, so the API token worked — while
cert-manager's propagation self-check looped **"DNS record not yet propagated"**. The record was
publicly resolvable at 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8; the NAT'd cluster's own DNS could not see it, because
split-horizon CoreDNS answers authoritatively for the zone and never forwards. The fix is live in
`platform/cert-manager/helmrelease.yaml`:

```yaml
dns01RecursiveNameservers: "1.1.1.1:53,8.8.8.8:53"
dns01RecursiveNameserversOnly: true
```

The challenge went pending → valid and the certificate Issued. If you find those two lines missing or
changed, that is your answer.

### Verify the alert can even fire (measured 2026-09-13)

**This alert is currently INERT.** `count(certmanager_clock_time_seconds)` returned **0 series** on
prod — there is no cert-manager scrape job among Prometheus's 19 jobs, so all three certificate rules
evaluate against nothing. Certificate health must be read from the CRs, as below. See
`/runbooks/targets-down` for the full list of inert rule groups.
## Running the commands in this runbook

`kubectl` does not work on the operator workstation. The toolchain lives only in the pinned dev
container, and the host's `k3s-oidc` context hangs on a browser prompt once its token expires —
that hang is not the cluster being down. Every command below runs as:

    infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c 'kubectl --context k3s-prod get nodes'

Always pass `--context k3s-prod` explicitly. `dev.sh` merges BOTH clusters into one kubeconfig and
picks a current-context per invocation, and **that default has already changed once** — it was k3s-dev
until dev was decommissioned on 2026-09-13, and is k3s-prod now. A command that names its context means
the same thing next month as it does today; one that relies on the default does not, and the failure is
silent (it answers confidently about the other cluster). `CLUSTER=prod infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run
kubectl ...` selects it explicitly, and every invocation prints a banner naming the cluster it is about
to talk to — read it. Do not run two `dev.sh` invocations at once; they share one container and
interfere.

USE FULLY-QUALIFIED RESOURCE NAMES, ALWAYS. Three CRDs on this cluster register the kind `Backup`:
`longhorn.io/v1beta2`, `postgresql.cnpg.io/v1` and `velero.io/v1`. The bare short name resolves to
Longhorn's, which holds zero objects — so `kubectl get backup -A` prints **"No resources found"** on
a cluster holding 6 Velero backups and 27 CNPG backups. Verified on prod 2026-09-13. Reading that as
"the backups are gone" and acting on it turns a false negative into real data loss. Write
`backups.velero.io`, `backups.postgresql.cnpg.io`, `clusters.postgresql.cnpg.io`,
`settings.longhorn.io`, `volumes.longhorn.io`, `nodes.longhorn.io`.

Mutating kubectl (`apply`, `patch`, `annotate`, `rollout`) and `flux reconcile` are blocked for
agents here: every durable change goes through git. **`main` is a protected branch — a direct push
is rejected.** A change lands by pushing a branch, opening a PR, and merging it once the gate is
green; that merge is the deploy. Where this runbook gives a mutating command it is for an operator,
and it says so.

## First commands

Walk the chain top-down — Certificate → CertificateRequest → Order → Challenge. The failure is almost
always visible at one specific level:

```
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod get certificates.cert-manager.io -A \
     -o custom-columns=NS:.metadata.namespace,NAME:.metadata.name,READY:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].status,MSG:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].message,NOTAFTER:.status.notAfter'
```

```
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod get certificaterequests.cert-manager.io -A; echo ==; \
   kubectl --context k3s-prod get orders.acme.cert-manager.io -A; echo ==; \
   kubectl --context k3s-prod get challenges.acme.cert-manager.io -A -o wide'
```

The controller log, which carries the actual ACME error text:

```
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod -n cert-manager logs deploy/cert-manager --tail=150 2>&1 | grep -iE "error|propagat|challenge|order|rate" | tail -30'
```

Is the TXT record really there? **Ask the authority, never a resolver** — 1.1.1.1 has served a deleted
TXT record here for minutes and produced a false failure diagnosis:

```
dig +short @betty.ns.cloudflare.com _acme-challenge.home.keithjackson.dev TXT
dig +short @1.1.1.1 _acme-challenge.home.keithjackson.dev TXT
```

Is the resolver override still configured?

```
grep -n "dns01Recursive" platform/cert-manager/helmrelease.yaml
```

The issuer and its credential:

```
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod get clusterissuers.cert-manager.io \
     -o custom-columns=NAME:.metadata.name,READY:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].status,MSG:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].message'
```

## Likely causes, most likely first

### 1. The DNS-01 propagation self-check cannot resolve the TXT record
The recorded failure. Signature: Challenge `Presented=true`, status looping on *"DNS record not yet
propagated"*, and `dig @betty.ns.cloudflare.com` **does** return the TXT. Cause: cert-manager is asking
the cluster's own resolver, which is split-horizon CoreDNS answering authoritatively for the zone and
never forwarding. Remediation: the two `dns01Recursive*` values above, in git.

### 2. The Cloudflare API token is wrong, expired, or scoped too narrowly
Signature: Challenge never reaches `Presented=true`, and the log carries a Cloudflare 403/6003. The
token lives in a SOPS-encrypted Secret. Note the standing rule from the OIDC incident: **non-secret
environment-specific values must never live inside an encrypted Secret** — `${BASE_DOMAIN}`
substitution cannot reach inside one, and that is precisely how prod's OIDC clients once ended up
pointed at dev's Keycloak. Keep hostnames out; keep only the token in.

### 3. `EXTERNALDNS_DOMAIN_FILTER` / zone confusion
Recorded as finding F-DNS1: the filter **must be the ZONE** (`keithjackson.dev`), not the subdomain.
A zone mismatch means the TXT record is created in the wrong place or not at all.

### 4. Two clusters racing the same `_acme-challenge` record
`infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md` §10: after the 2026-09-04 incident `platform-config` would have requested a
`*.home.keithjackson.dev` wildcard from letsencrypt-prod for a certificate dev already held; both
clusters would then have raced each other's `_acme-challenge` TXT records on one Cloudflare zone and
**neither would reliably solve DNS-01**. Only the tier being suspended prevented it. If any second
cluster exists, establish which one owns the zone first.

### 5. Let's Encrypt rate limit
`too many certificates already issued` in the log. One wildcard is well inside the limits, so this means
something has been retrying in a loop. Stop the loop and wait out the window.

### 6. A new Certificate for a hostname that does not resolve
A newly added service whose DNS is not yet published cannot solve DNS-01. Check ExternalDNS first.

## When to escalate or stop

- **Escalate if `wildcard-home` has been not-Ready for more than a day**, and check
  `/runbooks/cert-expiry` for how much runway the existing certificate has. Under 3 days of runway is an
  operator page.
- **Never switch `${ACME_CLUSTER_ISSUER}` to letsencrypt-staging** to get a green certificate. Staging
  issues fine and then breaks every in-cluster OIDC client with `x509: certificate signed by unknown
  authority` — that is the bug that forced LE-prod in the first place.
- **Do not delete the existing `wildcard-home-tls` Secret** while issuance is broken. A stale but valid
  certificate is far better than none.
- **Do not create certificates by hand.** cert-manager owns them; the durable change is in git.
- Rotating the Cloudflare token is an operator action (SOPS, DR path).

---
Source of truth: `runbooks/cert-issuance.md`. Index: `/runbooks/`
Records: `DECISIONS-LOG.md` "Fix 5 — cert-manager DNS-01 self-check via public resolvers"
(commit ~`59dd3d9`) and the LE-staging → LE-prod switch; `infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md` §10.