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Renewing or re-enrolling

When it comes to renewing or re-enrolling certificates, ncm-issuer will take care of this and do it before the certificate expires (the renewal grace period depends on the defined values in Certificate resource).

You can define what operation ncm-issuer should perform in such a case by setting certain PK rotation policy in the Certificate resource.

Field Operation Value
.spec.privateKey.rotationPolicy Re-enrollment Always or field omitted
.spec.privateKey.rotationPolicy Renewal Never (must be set explicitly)

Attention

From ncm-issuer 1.1.8 onwards, omitting .spec.privateKey.rotationPolicy means re-enrollment (private key rotation) instead of renewal. This aligns ncm-issuer behaviour with cert-manager v1.18.0+, where the default rotation policy changed from Never to Always. If you require a true renew-with-same-key flow, set .spec.privateKey.rotationPolicy to Never explicitly.

Note

There is also an option for enforcing the re-enrollment on renewal in the definition of Issuer or ClusterIssuer resource. To do this simply set .spec.reenrollmentOnRenew to true in Issuer or ClusterIssuer definition.

However, you can also trigger renewal or re-enrolling operation manually using one of the commands below.

In case you use cmctl:

$ cmctl renew <certificate> -n <namespace>

In case you have cert-manager kubectl plugin:

$ kubectl cert-manager renew <certificate> -n <namespace>