🔒 Certificate Lifecycle

Automated certificate lifecycle — from issuance to rotation

CertLocker owns the full cert lifecycle. Issue, track, renew, rotate, and revoke certificates automatically. No spreadsheets. No calendar reminders. No 3am incidents.

Every certificate — name, domain, group, status, and expiry — searchable in one place.

Why certs expire in production

Manual tracking doesn't scale

A spreadsheet with 10 certs is manageable. At 50 certs across multiple environments, something always falls through. At 200+, it's guaranteed to fail.

Calendar reminders get ignored or deleted

The person who set the reminder left the company. The renewal got pushed to "next sprint." The cert expired over a holiday weekend.

Delivery is a separate manual step

Even when someone remembers to renew, the new cert still has to land on the right server. Missing that step means the renewal accomplished nothing.

Read more: Why TLS certificates keep expiring — and how to fix it

How CertLocker handles the lifecycle

1

Issue

Request a cert from your CA (Let's Encrypt, internal CA, or commercial). CertLocker handles ACME challenges and stores the result securely.

2

Track

Every cert in your infrastructure is monitored. Expiry dates, assigned targets, rotation history — all visible in one dashboard.

3

Renew

30 days before expiry, renewal triggers automatically. No human required. New cert is issued and queued for delivery.

4

Deliver

The renewed cert is pushed to — or pulled by — every target that uses it. Services reload. Done. See delivery details.

Key capabilities

🔐

Certificate-scoped access keys

Each machine that needs to fetch a certificate gets a unique access token scoped to that specific cert. A compromised node can never access other certs in your account. This is the foundation of our security model.

📋

Immutable audit log

Every issuance, renewal, delivery, and revocation is logged with a timestamp, actor, and target. Useful for post-incident review and compliance reporting.

🔔

Expiry alerting

Even with automated renewal, you want to know what's happening. CertLocker sends alerts at 30, 14, and 7 days for any cert that hasn't successfully renewed — before it becomes an incident.

🌟

CA-agnostic

Use Let's Encrypt, your internal CA, ZeroSSL, or any ACME-compatible authority. CertLocker isn't a CA — it's the management layer that works with whatever authority you trust.

Related reading

Stop managing certs manually

CertLocker handles the entire lifecycle. You get the dashboard and the alerts.