step-ca
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step-ca is an online certificate authority for secure, automated X.509X.509A standard defining the format of public-key certificates, maintained by the ITU-T, used by cyber tools to authenticate identities and establish encrypted connections over TLS and similar protocols. and SSH certificate management for DevOps.
step-ca config.json --dns.strict
export STEP_CA_TOKEN=<your_linkedca_token>
"minimum": {
"publicKey": {
"length": 4096
}
}
"provisioners": [
{
"type": "SCEP",
"name": "scep-devices",
"defaultTLSPort": true
}
]
curl -X GET https://localhost:9001/admin/provisioners --cacert root-cert.pem -d '{"password": "admin-password"}'
step-ca --issuer-password-file /path/to/encrypted.key config.json
Summary
step-ca is an open-source online Certificate Authority for automated X.509 and SSH certificate management, released under the Apache 2.0 license and running as a service. It is aimed at DevOps teams managing infrastructure requiring certificate provisioning. Its documentation positions it alongside the step CLI tool, and it handles certificate issuance for TLS, mTLSmTLSMutual TLS, an encrypted connection where both client and server present certificates to prove their identity. It helps services verify who they are communicating with., and SSH, supporting ACMEACMEAn IETF-standard protocol (RFC 8555) for automating TLS certificate issuance and renewal, letting cyber tools manage certificates without manual CA interaction. and federation patterns. The project was first launched in 2016.
step-ca is an online certificate authority for secure, automated X.509 and SSH certificate management for DevOps.
How step-ca helps
How do I get my servers and services talking TLS without hand-issuing every certificate?
runs an ACME server that clients renew against automatically, so certificates for VMs, containers, APIs, and Kubernetes pods get issued and rotated without a human copying files around
How do I let engineers SSH into hosts without managing authorized-keys files everywhere?
issues short-lived SSH certificates to users after single sign-on and to hosts via cloud instance identity documents, so trust is chained to the CA instead of keys scattered across machines
Can I add automated certificate renewal to a legacy CA I already run?
operates as an online intermediate or registration authority in front of an existing root, so ACME-style automation sits on top of a PKI without replacing it
Who is allowed to request a certificate from this CA, and on what grounds?
provisioners define separate authorization methods per requester, so OIDC single sign-on, tokens, or cloud identity can each gate issuance differently
Which key types and lifetimes should this certificate use?
lets each issuance choose RSA, ECDSA, or EdDSA keys and a short lifetime, with defaults chosen so security decisions don't fall on whoever runs the command
How do I keep one certificate authority available if a server goes down?
supports root federation and multiple intermediaries so issuance can continue from more than one CA instance
Languages
Command line
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Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for step-ca, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
Score cards are part of every paid plan.
See plans → Already subscribed? Sign in →Trajectory
Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail step-ca puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Website history
smallstep.com, every changeSmallstep's home page and 10 more pages as they looked each month from September 2021 to October 2026: 25 renders, 4 changes of tagline or palette. Step through them, play them, or put any two months side by side.
Website history is included with Researcher and Business.
See plans → Already subscribed? Sign in →← → or h l a month · Shift a year · [ ] previous / next change · Space play · 1 2 3 page · T whole page · C compare · F full size
← → or h l the right month · Shift the left · S swap · W wipe · T whole page · Esc back
Rebranding timeline
Dates bound when a change appeared between captures. Possible rebrands are AI suggestions; a redesign alone does not establish a rebrand.
Releases
18 entries
No entries match these filters.
- March 20261
- December 20252
- July 20251
- November 20241
- July 20242
- April 20241
- August 20221
- May 20221
- September 20211
- August 20214
- July 20211
- May 20211
- March 20211
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in smallstep/certificates, 2023-12 – 2026-11, as of 2026-11-03. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 20 +6 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 4 +2 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 2 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 98% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 15 days first maintainer reply 3 days
- Open backlog 248 of 731 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 2 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 248
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 8,919
- bugs 41%
- features 35%
- other 24%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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