You Get HTTPS!

You-Get-HTTPS is a trusted-cert HTTPS frontliner for your local development servers.

You can use it to obtain a no-warnings, trusted local HTTPS frontliner for any local dev servers you may have, mapping domains over the local ports of these servers. The URL's FQDN is passed along, with HTTPS protocol info, to the proxied service.

As this is a thin wrapper over the amazing devcert tool, you automagically get all the goodness from devcert, including:

• Automatic trusted local CA creation and systemwide installation.
• Automatic certificate creation for any domain you configure, and all their subdomains, using that trusted CA.
• Automatic configuration of extra trust requirements for Chrome Linux and Firefox, when applicable.

Why not just use devcert / mkcert directly?

• mkcert is great at installing a trusted local CA and issuing certs for domain lists, but it stops there: you don't get an HTTPS endpoint with that cert, you need to either configure each of your local servers to go HTTPS on its own, or write your own frontline.
• devcert is absolutely awesome — which is why this tools sits on top of it — but you still need to write a frontline using its API to get a working HTTPS endpoint, typically over your existing Node server code, or with a bit more work, as a proxy over listening ports for dev servers you already have. Providing that frontline is precisely what You-Get-HTTPS does, to save you the hassle.

1. Installation

npm install --global you-get-https

The first time you'll run the tool, the underlying devcert will setup and install the trusted local CA. This requires the availability, in your PATH, of OpenSSL.

If you are on Windows and do not have OpenSSL installed, use this link to download the latest build and add its installed bin directory to your PATH.

Installing a trusted CA on your system often comes with a security prompt. For instance, on a French Windows 10 this may look like this:

2. Configuration

The configuration lives in a you-get-https.json5 file in your XDG_CONFIG_HOME (or by default, .config directory in your user profile's home directory). The file is JSON5 so you can, for instance, sprinkle comments in there, forego unnecessary key quoting and use trailing commas.

You specify your domain mappings through the mappings setting. Keys are domain names and values are port numbers. Here's an example:

{
  mappings: {
    // Masterclass project
    "assets.masterclass.test": 3001,
    "masterclass.test": 3000,

    // PremierCadeau project
    "assets.premiercadeau.test": 5001,
    "premiercadeau.test": 5000,
  }
}

A word about mapping precedence

Subdomains are automatically mapped to their suffixes, and the more specific (longer) domain suffixes always win the mapping, regardless of their order in the configuration.

3. Running You-Get-HTTPS

Frontline listening port

Unless you're going for a custom port above 1024, the default HTTPS port (443) may require administrator privileges for binding.

On Linux (including WSL) or OSX, this means you need to sudo it.

On Windows, if you're running it from a command line (Command Prompt, Powershell, etc.) and hitting a port security issue that cannot be solved with a dynamic prompt confirmation, you need to start that command line as Administrator. If you're running it through a shortcut file or direct call, this needs to be configured as Administrator or invoked with that specific mode.

Should that be an issue, you can configure a different frontline listening port, but you'll need to be explicit about it in your URLs then:

{
  frontline: {
    // Results in e.g. https://premiercadeau.test:1337/
    // Does not require admin privileges to bind.
    listen: 1337
  }
}

Once launched, you'll get a successful report looking like this:

Running it in the background

An easy way to "daemonize" You-Get-HTTPS in a cross-platform way is to start it with the awesome PM2 process manager. However, PM2 needs to run you module's entrypoint, which means you'll be better off installing You-Get-HTTPS "locally" and starting pm2 from its directory (instead of hunting around npm's global module installation paths).

If you're still game, here's something that would work

npm install you-get-https
npm install --global pm2
cd you-get-https
pm2 start index.js

Then from the directory you grabbed

“devcert password”

On Windows, devcert ciphers its local root CA credentials for extra security. Every time you run it with no-certificate-yet domains, it will prompt you for said password. That password is first set on the very first run, when the local root CA is installed, so be sure to remember it!

License

This tool is © 2020 Christophe Porteneuve & Delicious Insights, and is provided under the MIT license.

Contributing

Would you like to help? Awesome! I'm still formalizing a contribution strategy and trying to make it as easy as possible for everyone, but for now feel free to fork, add your stuff and send a PR!