A Web Developer’s Blog
It’s amazing being able to get free TLS certificates instantly from Let’s Encrypt.
But they don’t provide certificates for localhost
You can generate, and trust, your own certificates and I’ve written up how to do that but honestly it’s not a trivial process.
Here is how to use Let’s Encrypt for local dev.
As more and more of the web moves to https, we developers find more problems getting things to run properly.
It used to be easier to run development sites on http and maybe have a config option pretending it was secure, or use a fake certificate (often labelled “snakeoil”)
As the internet has matured this has become more problematic.
Some things just don’t work without https, browsers are less likely to let you ignore the warning, and if you develop a PWA it just won’t work without a valid, trusted certificate.
