johanwestling / localcert

Cross-platform utility for installing rootCA and generate certificates with mkcert.

Warning

This is a work in progress, this README.md and script content can change at any time for testing purposes.

Localcert

When working with containers (e.g. Docker) we sometimes find ourself in need of serving a local development server over https on a custom domain (other than https://localhost).

For a browser to see a connection as "secure" we will need a rootCA and a leaf certificate to sign the transfer between the browser and container properly.

localcert strive to be a convenience script for the procedure of installing a rootCA and generating a leaf certificate for your local development domain.

Generating ceritificates

1. Open a terminal.

   Windows users should use WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) for localcert script to function properly.

2. Change directory to your project directory:

   cd /path/to/project/directory

3. Download localcert script:

   curl -fsSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/johanwestling/localcert/main/localcert" -o localcert

4. Add .localcert to your project .gitignore file.

   The .localcert directory holds the mkcert binary and generated certificates.

5. Change localcert to be executable:

   chmod +x localcert

6. Generate project certificates:

   ./localcert project-name project-name.dev "*.project-name.dev"

Important

The localcert script will prompt for sudo (account credentials) only when needed. The steps that requires sudo at the moment is:

• Adding rootCA to MacOS keychain.
• Running update-ca-certificates on Linux.
• Copying rootCA from system directory.

Using ceritificates

When you have certificates generated for your project you will need to include or volume them in to your project container(s) and configure your development server to use them.