Show HN: Localdots – HTTPS domains for localhost with autoconfig and hot reload
github.com
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It automates creating a self-signed certificate and having it trusted in your local cert stores. I've always missed something when doing it by hand, so it's a great automation tool.
It helped to understand more about local cert storage (e.g. cert9.db) etc. but I prefer using a tool like this which is maintained by the community and probably still works some years from now.
Unless I'm forgetting something now, the only reason I switched to smallstep was for ACME support which mkcert lacks for now (see https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/issues/154).
I wanted an ACME solution to better automate the server config with Caddy.
This way the only possible certificates that can ever exist are those created during setup. After that nobody can sign more certificates because the private key needed doesn't exist any more, so you don't need to worry about constraints (which can have compatibility problems e.g. that's why Let's Encrypt X3 and X4 exist instead of X1 and X2 these days)
This must be a solved problem. How do you all do it?
These are command-line tools with NodeJS libraries, you can run them parallel to your project or internally. I am using the NodeJS libraries to create a URL when my tests start. Stripe recently added webhook endpoints to their API so you can also create webhooks bound to whatever URL you are assigned.
Something like puma-dev does this pretty painlessly out of the box too. Running a container just for that seems frankly overkill.
Then typically I just pass through nginx to HTTP locally, which is typically what I do in prod so the config isn't new to me