How to enable localhost to serve over HTTPS instead of HTTP

If you are technology enthusiastic like me, you have many times tried to integrate third party services with your app in local setup ex- Facebook/Google login for your app, Use blob storage of AWS/Azure in your app. Then you try to hit the endpoints from those services to do some operations and Alas! you are not getting any expected result. You spend hours yet unable to find what is the exact reason.

After spending more hours into debugging, you find that you have to serve your localhost in HTTPS to communicate with those third party services. Now you are confused whether it is possible to use HTTPS when you have not bought any domain and have not any server with specific IP address.

I had the same experience when I was trying build this — How to post content on Facebook (Meta) from your server app

You would be surprised to know actually it is possible.

Before sharing the steps to enable HTTPS, let me share some basic details why it is needed —

Enabling HTTPS in localhost is essential for secure data communication between a web server and a web client. When you enable HTTPS, the data transmitted between the two endpoints is encrypted, which makes it difficult for anyone to intercept and view the data. Without HTTPS, sensitive information such as login credentials, credit card numbers, and other personal data can be easily intercepted by attackers, which can result in identity theft, financial loss, and other serious consequences. By enabling HTTPS in localhost, you can ensure that your web application is secure and your users’ data is protected.

1. Download OpenSSL from its official website and install it. (If you have git bash already installed in your system, you don’t have to install OpenSSL)
2. Generate a private key by running the following command on OpenSSL or Git Bash.

3. Generate a certificate signing request by running following command –

You will asked different question about your country, company, name and email address etc. You can skip those by clicking enter.

4. Generate a self-signed certificate by running following command-

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in localhost.csr -signkey localhost.key -out localhost.crt

5. Install the certificate and you ready to serve your localhost over HTTPS.

Note: Self-signed certificates are not trusted by default by web browsers and may trigger security warnings. You can ignore these warnings or add the certificate as a trusted certificate on your system to avoid the warnings.