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step-ca

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step-ca is an online certificate authority for secure, automated certificate management for DevOps. It's the server counterpart to the step CLI tool for working with certificates and keys. Both projects are maintained by Smallstep Labs.

You can use step-ca to:


Comparison with Smallstep's commercial product

step-ca is optimized for a two-tier PKI serving common DevOps use cases.

As you design your PKI, if you need any of the following, consider our commerical CA:

See our full feature comparison for more.

You can start a free trial or set up a call with us to learn more.


Questions? Find us in Discussions or Join our Discord.

Website | Documentation | Installation | Contributor's Guide

Features

🦾 A fast, stable, flexible private CA

Setting up a public key infrastructure (PKI) is out of reach for many small teams. step-ca makes it easier.

⚙️ Many ways to automate

There are several ways to authorize a request with the CA and establish a chain of trust that suits your flow.

You can issue certificates in exchange for:

🏔 Your own private ACME server

ACME is the protocol used by Let's Encrypt to automate the issuance of HTTPS certificates. It's super easy to issue certificates to any ACMEv2 (RFC8555) client.

👩🏽‍💻 An online SSH Certificate Authority

🤓 A general purpose PKI tool, via step CLI integration

Installation

See our installation docs here.

Documentation

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