consul/website/content/docs/k8s/operations/certificate-rotation.mdx

---
layout: docs
page_title: Certificate Rotation
description: Rotate Certificate on Kubernetes Cluster safely
---

# Rotating Server Certificates

As of Consul Helm version `0.29.0`, if TLS is enabled, new TLS certificates for the Consul Server
are issued every time the Helm chart is upgraded. These certificates are signed by the same CA and will
continue to work as expected in the existing cluster.

Consul servers read the certificates from Kubernetes secrets during start-up and keep them in memory. In order to ensure the
servers use the newer certificate, the server pods need to be [restarted explicitly](/docs/k8s/upgrade#upgrading-consul-servers) in
a situation where `helm upgrade` does not restart the server pods.

To explicitly perform server certificate rotation, follow these steps:

1. Perform a `helm upgrade`:

   ```shell-session
   $ helm upgrade consul hashicorp/consul --values /path/to/my/values.yaml
   ```

   This should run the `tls-init` job that will generate new Server certificates.

1. Restart the Server pods following the steps [here](/docs/k8s/upgrade#upgrading-consul-servers).