Connect to clusters

You can connect CLIs, tools, and APIs to a remote YugabyteDB cluster when client-to-server encryption is enabled.

Prerequisites

In order to connect to your YugabyteDB clusters using encryption in transit, you have to enable client-to-server encryption and might need to enable server-to-server encryption (see Connecting to a YugabyteDB Cluster).

Each client that connects to a YugabyteDB cluster needs the following file to be accessible on the client computer:

ca.crt — root certificate file (for YSQL and YCQL). See Generate the root certificate file for instructions on how to generate this file.

This file should be available in the ~/.yugabytedb, the default location for TLS certificates when running the YSQL shell (ysqlsh) locally.

Connecting to a YugabyteDB Cluster

For each client, the steps assume that you have performed the following:

Enabled client-to-server encryption on the YB-TServer nodes of your YugabyteDB cluster.
Enabled server-to-server encryption on the YugabyteDB cluster.

ysqlsh

The ysqlsh CLI is available in the bin directory of your YugabyteDB home directory.

To connect to a remote YugabyteDB cluster, you need to have a local copy of ysqlsh available. You can use the ysqlsh CLI available on a locally installed YugabyteDB.

To open the local ysqlsh CLI and access your YugabyteDB cluster, run ysqlsh with the following flags defined:

host: -h <node-ip-address> (required for remote node; default is 127.0.0.1)
port: -p <port> (optional; default is 5433)
user: -U <username> (optional; default is yugabyte)
TLS/SSL: "sslmode=require" (required)

$ ./bin/ysqlsh -h 127.0.0.1 -p 5433 -U yugabyte "sslmode=require"

$ ./bin/ysqlsh
ysqlsh (11.2-YB-2.0.11.0-b0)
SSL connection (protocol: TLSv1.2, cipher: ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384, bits: 256, compression: off)
Type "help" for help.

yugabyte=#

yb-admin

To enable yb-admin to connect with a cluster having TLS enabled, pass in the extra argument of certs_dir_name with the directory location where the root certificate is present. The yb-admin tool is present on the cluster node in the ~/master/bin/ directory. The ~/yugabyte-tls-config directory on the cluster node contains all the certificates.

For example, the following command lists the master information for the TLS-enabled cluster:

export MASTERS=node1:7100,node2:7100,node3:7100
./bin/yb-admin --master_addresses $MASTERS -certs_dir_name ~/yugabyte-tls-config list_all_masters

You should see the following output format:

Master UUID	RPC Host/Port	State	Role
UUID_1 		node1:7100  	ALIVE 	FOLLOWER
UUID_2		node2:7100     	ALIVE 	LEADER
UUID_3 		node3:7100     	ALIVE 	FOLLOWER

ycqlsh

To enable ycqlsh to connect to a YugabyteDB cluster with encryption enabled, you need to set the following environment variables:

Variable	Description
`SSL_CERTFILE`	The root certificate file (`ca.crt`).

To set the environment variables, use the following export commands:

$ export SSL_CERTFILE=<path to file>/ca.crt

The next step is to connect using the --ssl flag.

Local Cluster

$ ./bin/ycqlsh --ssl

You should see the following output:

Connected to local cluster at X.X.X.X:9042.
[ycqlsh 5.0.1 | Cassandra 3.9-SNAPSHOT | CQL spec 3.4.2 | Native protocol v4]
Use HELP for help.
ycqlsh> DESCRIBE KEYSPACES;

system_schema  system_auth  system

Remote Cluster

To connect to a remote YugabyteDB cluster, you need to have a local copy of ycqlsh available. You can use the ycqlsh CLI available on a locally-installed YugabyteDB.

To open the local ycqlsh CLI and access the remote cluster, run ycqlsh with flags set for the host and port of the remote cluster. You must also add the --ssl flag to enable the use of the client-to-server encryption using TLS (successor to SSL), as follows:

$ ./bin/ycqlsh <node-ip-address> <port> --ssl

node-ip-address: the IP address of the remote node.
port: the port of the remote node.

For example, if the host is 127.0.0.2, the port is 9042, and the user is yugabyte, run the following command to connect:

$ ./bin/ycqlsh 127.0.0.2 9042 --ssl

You should see the following output:

Connected to local cluster at X.X.X.X:9042.
[ycqlsh 5.0.1 | Cassandra 3.9-SNAPSHOT | CQL spec 3.4.2 | Native protocol v4]
Use HELP for help.
ycqlsh> DESCRIBE KEYSPACES;

system_schema  system_auth  system