Setting up a 100% Local Environment with Step-CA

zachi40

Hi everyone,
I’ve started using CertWarden, and I really love the product!.
I am looking for help building an entirely local, zero-to-production certificate environment. I want to use a local Step-CA instance as the ACME server to sign and create certificates for my lab machines (like my router and local apps) without using the public internet.

Has anyone successfully built this specific environment on Docker?
If someone has a proven Docker Compose setup or a guideline for building this as a local-only setup, I would really appreciate the help.

Thanks for the great software and for any help you can provide!

gregtwallace

I know other people have done this. Should be straightforward.

There is a minor wrinkle you’ll have to deal with though: https://forum.certwarden.com/d/83-step-ca-acme-servertrusted-acme-root-cert

zachi40

Thanks for the assistance. I’ve made some progress: I managed to get step-ca up and configured the ACME Servers category. I also successfully created a user (in ACME Accounts) and a private key.

However, I'm now stuck at the certificate creation stage. I added the request to ACME Orders, but it hangs there. Looking at the step-ca Docker logs, I see the error: "The server could not connect to validation target."

It’s important to note that my step-ca is running inside a Docker container, but the certificates are for an environment outside of Docker. Do you have any idea how to resolve this connectivity issue?

gregtwallace

That "The server could not connect to validation target." error is quite vague. I Googled it and it looks like this is a generic step-ca error.

Do you have step-ca working with any other clients? I'm inclined to suspect this is an issue with your step-ca instance.