mkcert VS acme-dns

The experimental HTTPS flag relies on mkcert, designed for a single development system. If you run a Docker container, the flag won’t configure your local browser to trust its certificate.

The author mentions difficulties with HTTPS and trying stuff locally.

I've had some success with mkcert [1] to easily create certificates trusted by browsers, I can suggest to look into this. You are your own root CA, I think it can work without an internet connection.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/

Solution: mkcert – Your Zero-Configuration HTTPS Enabler Meet mkcert, a user-friendly, zero-configuration tool designed for creating locally-trusted development certificates. Find it on its GitHub page and follow the instructions tailored for your operating system. For Mac users employing Homebrew, simply execute the following commands in your terminal:

Well, Certifi does not ship with your company's certificates! So requesting internal services may come with additional painful extra steps! Also for a local development environment that uses mkcert for example!

My project, getlocalcert.net[1] may be the one you're thinking of.

Since I'm also building in this space, I'll give my perspective. Local certificate generation is complicated. If you spend the time, you can figure it out, but it's begging for a simpler solution. You can use tools like mkcert[2] for anything that's local to your machine. However, if you're already using ACME in production, maybe you'd prefer to use ACME locally? I think that's what Anchor offers, a unified approach.

There's a couple references in the Anchor blog about solving the distribution problem by building better tooling[3]. I'm eager to learn more, that's a tough nut to crack. My theory for getlocalcert is that the distribution problem is too difficult (for me) to solve, so I layer the tool on top of Let's Encrypt certificates instead. The end result for both tools is a trusted TLS certificate issued via ACME automation.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674224

2. https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

3. https://blog.anchor.dev/the-acme-gap-introducing-anchor-part...

Looks like step-ca/step-cli [1] and mkcert [2] have been mentioned. Another related tool is XCA [3] - a gui tool to manage CAs and server/client TLS certificates. It takes off some of the tedium in using openssl cli directly. It also stores the certs and keys in an encrypted database. It doesn't solve the problem of getting the root CA certificate into the system store or of hosting the revocation list. I use XCA to create and store the root CA. Intermediate CAs signed with it are passed to other issuers like vault and step-issuer.

[1] https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/

[2] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

[3] https://hohnstaedt.de/xca/

We use mkcert for this, it works wonderfully.

https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

Getting a wildcard certificate from LE might be a better option, depending on how easy the extra bit of if plumbing is with your lab setup.

You need to use DNS based domain identification, and once you have a cert distribute it to all your services. The former can be automated using various common tools (look at https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns, self-hosted unless you are only securing toys you don't really care about, if you self host DNS or your registrar doesn't have useful API access) or you can leave that as an every ~ten weeks manual job, the latter involves scripts to update you various services when a new certificate is available (either pushing from where you receive the certificate or picking up from elsewhere). I have a little VM that holds the couple of wildcard certificates (renewing them via DNS01 and acmedns on a separate machine so this one is impossible to see from the outside world), it pushes the new key and certificate out to other hosts (simple SSH to copy over then restart nginx/Apache/other).

Of course you may decide that the shin if your own CA is easier than setting all this up, as you can sign long lived certificates for yourself. I prefer this because I don't need to switch to something else if I decide to give friends/others access to something.

As someone else said, it’s a huge pain to run your own dns services. However, if you want some separation, I recently saw https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns

v0.9.1 is out and natively supports both https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns and any dns provider available in https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh

I have set up an acme-dns server to answer ACME DNS Challenges: https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns

The DNS challenge can be easily automated using https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns - you do need an IP you can run a DNS server on though.

If your server is not accessible over the internet, you can still use Let's Encrypt or ZeroSSL to get a certificate. You'll just need to set up a DNS Challenge for things to work. This is a little more complicated, but can work even if your DNS provider doesn't have an API. For example, I use Google Domains and Google DNS (not cloud DNS) for my DNS server, but I've got an instance of acme-dns running on VPS box that handles the DNS auth for me. It's how every machine on my local network has valid certificates - but I annoyingly need to renew them every 90 days.

It's a bit more involved, but you can set up wildcard certificates to update automatically. Certbot has some pre-made plugins for this for several DNS providers. If yours is not on that list, there's a tool called acme-dns which is a minimal DNS server you can run on your server and delegate _acme-challenge.yourdomain.com to. If you don't want to run that on your own, you can also use the publicly hosted server/API for it.

In case you're not already familiar with it: one thing I'd recommend is using https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns to obtain the certificates. You basically just point the subdomain you need wildcard certs for at that DNS server (a one time thing, ie you don't have to do this every three months), and the related tool https://github.com/acme-dns/acme-dns-client can get the certificates in a nice, automated, way without you ever having to expose the private reverse proxy to the Internet.