Certificates

The Things Stack has built in support for Transport Layer Security (TLS) and HTTPS. This requires a TLS certificate and a corresponding key. For using The Things Stack behind an external proxy that can terminate TLS see the proxy section.

In this guide, we request a free, trusted certificate from Let’s Encrypt, using the built in ACME support, but if you already have a certificate (cert.pem) and a corresponding key (key.pem), you can also use those.

If you are deploying using ACME, move to the Automatic Certificate Management section.

If you already have CA certificates, move to the Using Custom Certificates section.

If you are deploying locally you can set up your own Certificate Authority and issue a certificate-key pair. Move to the Custom Certificate Authority section.

Automatic Certificate Management

The Things Stack can be configured to automatically retrieve and update Let’s Encrypt certificates. Assuming you followed the configuration steps, create an acme directory where The Things Stack can store the certificate data:

mkdir ./acme
sudo chown 886:886 ./acme

The directory hierarchy should look like this:

acme/
docker-compose.yml          # defines Docker services for running The Things Stack
config/
└── stack/
    └── ttn-lw-stack-docker.yml    # configuration file for The Things Stack

If you are using Let’s Encrypt in a multi-tenant The Things Stack environment, make sure you specify all tenant addresses in the TLS configuration of ttn-lw-stack-docker.yml. Read more in the TLS section.

Certificates will automatically be requested the first time you access The Things Stack. You will notice that the page takes some time to load while certificates are obtained in the background.

Once you have created the acme folder and given it appropriate permissions, move on to run The Things Stack!

Custom Certificate Authority

To use TLS on a local or offline deployment, you can use your own Certificate Authority. In order to set that up, you can use cfssl, CloudFlare’s PKI/TLS toolkit. The cfssl installation instructions can be found here.

Create a ca.json file and write the following configuration to it:

{
  "names": [
    {
      "C": "NL",
      "ST": "Noord-Holland",
      "L": "Amsterdam",
      "O": "The Things Demo"
    }
  ]
}

Then use the following command to generate the CA key and certificate:

cfssl genkey -initca ca.json | cfssljson -bare ca

Now write the configuration for your certificate to cert.json:

{
  "hosts": ["thethings.example.com"],
  "names": [
    {
      "C": "NL",
      "ST": "Noord-Holland",
      "L": "Amsterdam",
      "O": "The Things Demo"
    }
  ]
}

Then, run the following command to generate the server key and certificate:

cfssl gencert -ca ca.pem -ca-key ca-key.pem cert.json | cfssljson -bare cert

The next steps assume the certificate key is called key.pem, so you’ll need to rename cert-key.pem to key.pem.

At the end, your directory should look like this:

cert.pem
key.pem
ca.pem
docker-compose.yml          # defines Docker services for running The Things Stack
config/
└── stack/
    └── ttn-lw-stack-docker.yml    # configuration file for The Things Stack

Be sure to configure docker-compose.yml and ttn-lw-stack-docker.yml for your custom certificates, as shown in using custom certificates.

Using Custom Certificates

To use CA certificates you already have or self-signed certificates, you will need to specify the custom certificates section of docker-compose.yml:

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    # If using custom certificates:
    secrets:
      - ca.pem
      - cert.pem
      - key.pem

# If using custom certificates:
secrets:
  ca.pem:
    file: ./ca.pem
  cert.pem:
    file: ./cert.pem
  key.pem:
    file: ./key.pem

You will also need to comment out the Let’s Encrypt section of ttn-lw-stack-docker.yml:

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# Let's encrypt for "thethings.example.com"
# tls:
#   source: acme
#   acme:
#     enable: true
#     dir: /var/lib/acme
#     email: "you@thethings.example.com"
#     hosts: ["thethings.example.com"]

And uncomment the custom certificates section:

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# If using custom certificates:
tls:
  source: file
  root-ca: /run/secrets/ca.pem
  certificate: /run/secrets/cert.pem
  key: /run/secrets/key.pem

In order to use the certificate (cert.pem) and key (key.pem), you also need to set these permissions:

sudo chown 886:886 ./cert.pem ./key.pem

The directory hierarchy should look like this:

cert.pem
key.pem
docker-compose.yml          # defines Docker services for running The Things Stack
config/
└── stack/
    └── ttn-lw-stack-docker.yml    # configuration file for The Things Stack

Make sure you have configured docker-compose.yml and ttn-lw-stack-docker.yml for your custom certificates, as shown in using custom certificates.

Now that the permissions have been set you can move on to run The Things Stack!