ClusterIssuers

ClusterIssuers are a resource type similar to Issuers. They are specified in exactly the same way, but they do not belong to a single namespace and can be referenced by Certificate resources from multiple different namespaces.

They are particularly useful when you want to provide the ability to obtain certificates from a central authority (e.g. Letsencrypt, or your internal CA) and you run single-tenant clusters.

The docs for Issuer resources apply equally to ClusterIssuers.

You can specify a ClusterIssuer resource by changing the kind attribute of an Issuer to ClusterIssuer, and removing the metadata.namespace attribute:

apiVersion: certmanager.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: ClusterIssuer
metadata:
  name: letsencrypt-prod
spec:
...

We can then reference a ClusterIssuer from a Certificate resource by setting the spec.issuerRef.kind field to ClusterIssuer:

apiVersion: certmanager.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
  name: my-certificate
  namespace: my-namespace
spec:
  secretName: my-certificate-secret
  issuerRef:
    name: letsencrypt-prod
    kind: ClusterIssuer
  ...

For more information on configuring Issuer resources, see the Issuers reference documentation.