How to use HTTPS for local development

9 min read

To use HTTPS for local development, you can create a self-signed SSL certificate and configure your web server to use it.

Here are the steps to do this on a local Apache web server:

  1. Generate a self-signed SSL certificate using the openssl command-line tool. For example:

$ openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout localhost.key -out localhost.crt

This will create a key file (localhost.key) and a certificate file (localhost.crt) in the current directory.

  1. Configure your Apache web server to use the SSL certificate. This typically involves adding the following lines to your Apache configuration file (e.g., httpd.conf):

LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so

Listen 443

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName localhost
    DocumentRoot /path/to/your/website
    SSLEngine on
    SSLCertificateFile /path/to/localhost.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/localhost.key
</VirtualHost>
  1. Restart your Apache web server to apply the changes.

After completing these steps, you should be able to access your website using HTTPS on your local machine. For example, you can visit https://localhost/ in your web browser to access your website.

Note that the self-signed SSL certificate you created is not trusted by web browsers, so you will likely see a warning message when accessing your website using HTTPS. To avoid this warning, you can either use a trusted SSL certificate (e.g., from a certificate authority) or add the self-signed certificate to the list of trusted certificates in your web browser.