Configuring Harbor with HTTPS Access

Because Harbor does not ship with any certificates, it uses HTTP by default to serve registry requests. However, it is highly recommended that security be enabled for any production environment. Harbor has an Nginx instance as a reverse proxy for all services, you can use the prepare script to configure Nginx to enable https.

In a test or development environment, you may choose to use a self-signed certificate instead of the one from a trusted third-party CA. The followings will show you how to create your own CA, and use your CA to sign a server certificate and a client certificate.

Getting Certificate Authority

  openssl genrsa -out ca.key 4096

  openssl req -x509 -new -nodes -sha512 -days 3650 \
    -subj "/C=TW/ST=Taipei/L=Taipei/O=example/OU=Personal/CN=yourdomain.com" \
    -key ca.key \
    -out ca.crt

Getting Server Certificate

Assuming that your registry's hostname is yourdomain.com, and that its DNS record points to the host where you are running Harbor. In production environment, you first should get a certificate from a CA. In a test or development environment, you can use your own CA. The certificate usually contains a .crt file and a .key file, for example, yourdomain.com.crt and yourdomain.com.key.

1) Create your own Private Key:

  openssl genrsa -out yourdomain.com.key 4096

2) Generate a Certificate Signing Request:

If you use FQDN like yourdomain.com to connect your registry host, then you must use yourdomain.com as CN (Common Name).

  openssl req -sha512 -new \
    -subj "/C=TW/ST=Taipei/L=Taipei/O=example/OU=Personal/CN=yourdomain.com" \
    -key yourdomain.com.key \
    -out yourdomain.com.csr 

3) Generate the certificate of your registry host:

Whether you're using FQDN like yourdomain.com or IP to connect your registry host, run this command to generate the certificate of your registry host which comply with Subject Alternative Name (SAN) and x509 v3 extension requirement:

v3.ext

cat > v3.ext <<-EOF
authorityKeyIdentifier=keyid,issuer
basicConstraints=CA:FALSE
keyUsage = digitalSignature, nonRepudiation, keyEncipherment, dataEncipherment
extendedKeyUsage = serverAuth 
subjectAltName = @alt_names

[alt_names]
DNS.1=yourdomain.com
DNS.2=yourdomain
DNS.3=hostname
EOF

  openssl x509 -req -sha512 -days 3650 \
    -extfile v3.ext \
    -CA ca.crt -CAkey ca.key -CAcreateserial \
    -in yourdomain.com.csr \
    -out yourdomain.com.crt

Configuration and Installation

1) Configure Server Certificate and Key for Harbor

After obtaining the yourdomain.com.crt and yourdomain.com.key files, you can put them into directory such as /root/cert/:

  cp yourdomain.com.crt /data/cert/
  cp yourdomain.com.key /data/cert/ 

2) Configure Server Certificate, Key and CA for Docker

The Docker daemon interprets .crt files as CA certificates and .cert files as client certificates.

Convert server yourdomain.com.crt to yourdomain.com.cert:

openssl x509 -inform PEM -in yourdomain.com.crt -out yourdomain.com.cert

Delpoy yourdomain.com.cert, yourdomain.com.key, and ca.crt for Docker:

  cp yourdomain.com.cert /etc/docker/certs.d/yourdomain.com/
  cp yourdomain.com.key /etc/docker/certs.d/yourdomain.com/
  cp ca.crt /etc/docker/certs.d/yourdomain.com/

The following illustrates a configuration with custom certificates:

/etc/docker/certs.d/
    └── yourdomain.com:port   
       ├── yourdomain.com.cert  <-- Server certificate signed by CA
       ├── yourdomain.com.key   <-- Server key signed by CA
       └── ca.crt               <-- Certificate authority that signed the registry certificate

Notice that you may need to trust the certificate at OS level. Please refer to the Troubleshooting section below.

3) Configure Harbor

Edit the file harbor.cfg, update the hostname and the protocol, and update the attributes ssl_cert and ssl_cert_key:

  #set hostname
  hostname = yourdomain.com:port
  #set ui_url_protocol
  ui_url_protocol = https
  ......
  #The path of cert and key files for nginx, they are applied only the protocol is set to https 
  ssl_cert = /data/cert/yourdomain.com.crt
  ssl_cert_key = /data/cert/yourdomain.com.key

Generate configuration files for Harbor:

  ./prepare

If Harbor is already running, stop and remove the existing instance. Your image data remain in the file system

  docker-compose down -v

Finally, restart Harbor:

  docker-compose up -d

After setting up HTTPS for Harbor, you can verify it by the following steps:

• Open a browser and enter the address: https://yourdomain.com. It should display the user interface of Harbor.

• Notice that some browser may still shows the warning regarding Certificate Authority (CA) unknown for security reason even though we signed certificates by self-signed CA and deploy the CA to the place mentioned above. It is because self-signed CA essentially is not a trusted third-party CA. You can import the CA to the browser on your own to solve the warning.

• On a machine with Docker daemon, make sure the option "-insecure-registry" for https://yourdomain.com does not present.

• If you mapped nginx port 443 to another port, then you should instead create the directory /etc/docker/certs.d/yourdomain.com:port (or your registry host IP:port). Then run any docker command to verify the setup, e.g.

  docker login yourdomain.com

If you've mapped nginx 443 port to another, you need to add the port to login, like below:

  docker login yourdomain.com:port

##Troubleshooting

1. You may get an intermediate certificate from a certificate issuer. In this case, you should merge the intermediate certificate with your own certificate to create a certificate bundle. You can achieve this by the below command:

   cat intermediate-certificate.pem >> yourdomain.com.crt 
   

2. On some systems where docker daemon runs, you may need to trust the certificate at OS level.
   On Ubuntu, this can be done by below commands:

   cp yourdomain.com.crt /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/yourdomain.com.crt
   update-ca-certificates

   On Red Hat (CentOS etc), the commands are:

   cp yourdomain.com.crt /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/yourdomain.com.crt
   update-ca-trust