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Really easy way to use HTTPS on localhost

rhymes on January 08, 2019

Testing if your site works well on your local machine is always burdensome. I found a tool that makes it really simple, mkcert: ➜ localhost-ht...

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John Horner • Jan 9 '19

OK, but, what version of cat is that? Never seen anything like it. And how do you turn the extra stuff off?

rhymes • Jan 9 '19

Hi John,

it's bat aliased to cat :-)

And how do you turn the extra stuff off?

what do you mean?

John Horner • Jan 9 '19

I just meant if you wanted the standard behaviour of cat, because if you did cat file.txt > otherfile.txt that formatting would cause you to have a bad time, OK?

rhymes • Jan 9 '19

Ah ok!

No, it doesn't happen:

➜  ~ unalias cat
➜  ~ cat > filea.txt
this is a file written with standard cat
➜  ~ bat filea.txt
───────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       │ File: filea.txt
───────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1   │ this is a file written with standard cat
───────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
➜  ~ bat filea.txt > fileb.txt
➜  ~ cat fileb.txt
this is a file written with standard cat

James Turner • Jan 28 '19 • Edited

I'm curious to how it knows to change the output depending where the output is directed to. Like aren't both stdout from the point of view of bat?

rhymes • Jan 28 '19

You can detect if the output is being redirected with POSIX functions isatty(3) and fstat(2)

Andy Zhao (he/him) • Jan 8 '19

Hope it works well with Rails. I have had so much trouble trying to a local HTTPS server running with Rails :( I almost always end up using ngrok.

Thorsten Springhart • Feb 15 '19 • Edited

Works fine with rails. After creating / installing your certificate as described in the article, start your rails server via rails s -b 'ssl://localhost:3000?key=./localhost-key.pem&cert=./localhost.pem'

rhymes • Jan 8 '19

Let me know, I haven't tried :)

rhymes • Jan 9 '19

I'm not that familiar with Docker so I don't know. The tool is a standard Go binary and I guess if you open the port of the web app serving you might accomplish something.

You need to root in your container to install it though, just downgrade your permissions after that.

Templar++ • Jan 10 '19

Why? You can create a test domain or subdomain and use letsencrypt.

rhymes • Jan 10 '19 • Edited

You can also use ngrok, mkcert seems easier than all the options I can think of, ngrok included

Templar++ • Jan 10 '19

Yes, but letsencrypt will work even if someone else is accessing your dev server and the effort isn't any bigger, so why bother creating local certificates if you can create a valid one?

rhymes • Jan 11 '19 • Edited

Can you write an article about it? It would be useful for everyone. Thank you!

Alexey • Mar 30 '21

I love the mkcert setup you describe. That said, letsencrypt is also awesome!

I've written an article about it: dev.to/alexeydc/modern-https-confi...

Avalander • Jan 9 '19

Hey, that's really useful, thanks for sharing!

Santiago • Jan 20 '19

Do you know if this works with a XAMPP or LAMPP localhost server? I would like to use this for my wordpress projecs.

rhymes • Jan 20 '19

I believe so, it's independent from the technology of the server. It just needs to support TLS.

I'm not familiar with either XAMPP or LAMPP but judging from a search engine query you need a tutorial on how to use a certificate with Apache. This seems a valid one (from Step 2): digitalocean.com/community/tutoria...

Santiago • Jan 20 '19

Thanks, in the past I tried some tutorials and other techniques but I found difficult to install them in the browser "trust stores", this one seems easy, I will give it a try!