Create SSL Certificate for localhost

3 min readApr 17, 2022

Have you ever caught up in a situation where you needed HTTPS on your localhost server for development or testing purposes?

In this article we’ll see how we can create SSL Certificate for localhost.

We’ll move from http://localhost to https://localhost with the help of mkcert tool.

mkcert is a simple tool for making locally-trusted development certificates. It requires no configuration.

Overview

Install Nginx to create web server
Configure Nginx to Listen on port 443(HTTPS).
Install mkcert (Link: mkcert)
Generate SSL Certificate
Use SSL certificate in Nginx
Test HTTPS

I’m going to use Nginx to create web server on my machine.

1. To install Nginx in Ubuntu 20.04.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y nginx nginx-common
sudo systemctl start nginx

Open your browser and type localhost to open default nginx page.

2. Let’s configure Nginx to listen on 443 (HTTPS).

sudo vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/local.conf

copy paste below sample configuration and save file.

server { 
 
     listen 80; 
     listen [::]:80; 
     listen 443; 
     listen [::]:443 ; 
 
     root /var/www/html; 
     index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html; 
 
     location / { 
             try_files $uri $uri/ =404; 
     } 
 
}

Restart Nginx.

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Now let’s try to open Nginx on HTTPS.

you’ll get error something like that.

It’s time to create SSL Certificates for our localhost.

3. Install mkcert tool (I’m using Ubuntu 20.04).

sudo apt install libnss3-tools #installing certutil
sudo apt install mkcert  #install mkcert
mkcert -install

you should see output similar to this 👇.

4. Generate SSL Certificate

mkcert localhost

above command will create 2 files localhost.pem and localhost-key.pem in your current working directory.

5. Use SSL certificate in Nginx

we have to tell Nginx to use our mkcert generated pem files.

sudo vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/local.conf

replace configuration with this

server { 
 
     listen 80; 
     listen [::]:80; 
     listen 443 ssl; 
     listen [::]:443 ssl; 
 
     ssl_certificate /home/ubuntu/localhost.pem; 
     ssl_certificate_key /home/ubuntu/localhost-key.pem; 
 
     root /var/www/html; 
     index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html; 
 
     location / { 
             try_files $uri $uri/ =404; 
     } 
 
}