mkcert VS cmder

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

mkcert: This is used to obtain a trusted TLS certificate with a custom domain name for your development machine. You can install mkcert on your development machine following the official instructions.

I've been pretty frustrated with how private CAs are supported. Your private root CA can be maliciously used to MITM every domain on the Internet, even though you intend to use it for only a couple domain names. Most people forget to set Name Constraints when they create these and many helper tools lack support [1][2]. Worse, browser support for Name Constraints has been slow [3] and support isn't well tracked [4]. Public CAs give you certificate transparency and you can subscribe to events to detect mis-issuance. Some hosted private CAs like AWS's offer logs [5], but DIY setups don't.

Even still, there are a lot of folks happily using private CAs, they aren't the target audience for this initial release.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/issues/302

[2] https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/issues/3655

[3] https://alexsci.com/blog/name-non-constraint/

[4] https://github.com/Netflix/bettertls/issues/19

[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/privateca/latest/userguide/secur...

[Windows only]

I recently discovered Cmder:

https://cmder.app/

It's a portable console emulator and gives you the ability to "place your own executable files into the bin folder to be injected into your PATH" when it's run.

So far I've added:

jq

Assuming you already have Visual Studio Code installed, the first thing you'll want to do is Download Cmder. Extract the files to C:\cmder, or wherever you like.

I use cmder, it's great https://cmder.app/

The multiple supported shells remind me a little bit of the Windows cmder app, which I recall being pretty decent: https://cmder.app/

But the cross platform aspect is really nice, even if in my experience using different terminal apps per platform hasn't been too big of an issue.

Maybe except for MobaXTerm feeling better than most Linux tabbed/split terminal offerings due to its usability and support for sending input to multiple remote sessions at the same time, SSH integration etc.: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ (something like Remmina is on par with mRemoteNG, so nice but not quite there)

I've since found that dev workflows in Windows work pretty damn good now, actually. I hate PowerShell so I still don't use it, but I now use Nushell, Cmder, and Git-Bash as my shells within the native Windows terminal emulator and it's actually pretty damn good and very close to the Unix experience. I actually like the native Windows terminal more than Kitty and would switch to it on my Ubuntu machine and my work MacBook if it were available on these systems.

If you haven't tried Cmder yet you definitely should.

The Second was to directly avoid powershell & cmd altogether .. i also used cmder which gave me a feeling of Linux on windows