Ubuntu Manpage: cockpit-tls - TLS proxy for Cockpit web service

NAME

       cockpit-tls - TLS proxy for Cockpit web service

SYNOPSIS

       cockpit-tls [--help] [--port PORT] [--no-tls] [--idle-timeout SECONDS]

DESCRIPTION

       The cockpit-tls program is a TLS terminating HTTP proxy for cockpit-ws(8). It manages a
       set of isolated cockpit-ws instances, one per TLS client certificate, plus one for TLS
       without a client certificate, and one for unencrypted HTTP. With that, one session cannot
       tamper with another one through possible security vulnerability exploits.

       Users or administrators should never need to start this program as it automatically
       started by systemd(1) via socket activation.

TRANSPORT SECURITY

To specify the TLS certificate the web service should use, simply drop a file with the
extension .cert in the /etc/cockpit/ws-certs.d directory, or below $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS if set
(see cockpit.conf[1]). If there are multiple files in this directory, then the highest
priority one is chosen after sorting.

The .cert file should contain at least two OpenSSL style PEM blocks. First one or more
BEGIN CERTIFICATE blocks for the server certificate and intermediate certificate
authorities and a second one containing a BEGIN PRIVATE KEY or similar. The key must not
be encrypted.

If there is no TLS certificate, a self-signed certificate is automatically generated using
sscg (if available) or openssl and stored in the 0-self-signed.cert file.

When enrolling into a FreeIPA domain, an SSL certificate is requested from the IPA server
and stored in 10-ipa.cert.

To check which certificate cockpit-ws will use, run the following command.

$ sudo /usr/libexec/cockpit-certificate-ensure --check

Or, on Debian-based systems:

$ sudo /usr/lib/cockpit/cockpit-certificate-ensure --check

If using certmonger to manage certificates, following command can be used to generate a
certificate/key pair:

CERT_FILE=/etc/cockpit/ws-certs.d/50-certmonger.crt
KEY_FILE=/etc/cockpit/ws-certs.d/50-certmonger.key

getcert request -f ${CERT_FILE} -k ${KEY_FILE} -D $(hostname --fqdn)

OPTIONS

       --help
           Show help options.

       --port PORT
           Serve HTTP requests on PORT instead of port 9090. Usually Cockpit is started on demand
           by systemd socket activation, and this option has no effect. Update the ListenStream
           directive cockpit.socket file in the usual systemd manner.

       --no-tls
           Don't use TLS. Certificates will not be read, and https connections denied. Then
           cockpit-tls will only manage a single cockpit-ws instance, and thus not do anything
           different than running cockpit-ws --no-tls directly. Only use this for debugging or
           testing.

       --idle-timeout SECONDS
           If greater than 0, exit if no connections have happened for the given number of
           seconds, i. e. the server is idle. If not given, the default is 90.

ENVIRONMENT

       The cockpit-tls program expects the RUNTIME_DIRECTORY environment variable to be set to an
       empty directory (preferably in /run/) that is only accessible by the system user under
       which it is running. This contains the Unix sockets for communicating with the cockpit-ws
       instances, and in the future, state information about client certificates. This variable
       is normally set by the cockpit.service systemd unit.

       In addition, cockpit-tls will use the XDG_CONFIG_DIRS environment variable from the XDG
       basedir spec[2] to find its certificates and the cockpit.conf(5) configuration file.

BUGS

       Please send bug reports to either the distribution bug tracker or the upstream bug
       tracker[3].

AUTHOR

       Cockpit has been written by many contributors[4].

NOTES

        1. cockpit.conf
           [set $man.base.url.for.relative.links]/./cockpit.conf.5.html

        2. XDG basedir spec
           https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

        3. upstream bug tracker
           https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/new

        4. contributors
           https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/graphs/contributors