Mkcert: Tool for making locally-trusted development certificates | Hacker News Reader

Mkcert: Tool for making locally-trusted development certificates

github.com

218 pointsvaibhavmule38 comments

(All the below assumes I can read 'Go')

Nit picks about these certificates:

The certificates have a lifetime of 10 years starting from the exact moment they're created. I suspect ten years is overkill, but I don't see much real harm in it. However it's common practice to set the notBefore into the recent past, this is because a variety of problems may cause clock drift. This is your development environment, so you _could_ fix any drift, but this sort of tool is all about productivity, so I think "back dating" by one day or even an hour to allow for drift would be a sound idea.

The EKU says TLS Server, I'd be tempted to throw TLS Client in there too. It would appear tempting to say anyUsage, but actually some peers will decide this is overbroad and reject your certificate so don't do that. But having TLS Client might be nice if anybody is working on mutual authentication (both client and server present certificates, not very friendly for B2C apps but I like it in B2B).

The Key Usage says Key Encipherment and Digital Signature. Again it's harmless in a development environment, but security-oriented live systems ought to contemplate removing Key Encipherment.

The only reason you'd need Key Encipherment in TLS is because you're doing RSA key agreement, which means you aren't getting Forward Secrecy by definition and you're probably using some pretty rusty components. So it could make sense to spot that "Oops, we're trying to do RSA key agreement - why?" in a development system before you ship it and discover you're offering radically less security than you expected for some reason.

Hi! Author here.

I was backdating, but I realized a correct notBefore helps identifying when and why you made the certificate. I removed the backdating at the same time as I added the host name in the OU. Nobody has complained so far, so probably not a real problem on dev environments.

I would kind of hope that for client auth you’d have support for a custom root instead of the system pool, hence not needing mkcert (in its current form). But if someone actually finds themselves needing that I’d accept a PR.

Key Usage has been screwed up so much than nearly no one checks them, but in any case I don’t feel like this is the place to fight the RSA key exchange.

  npx tlx-keygen

- No installation required, npx comes with Node.js and downloads/runs/removes the package.

- Generate localhost certs with support for *.localhost, 127.0.0.1 (IPv4), ::1 (IPv6), etc.

- Register in operating system trust store (Win/Lin/Mac)

- Tested with major browsers (Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge)

https://www.npmjs.com/package/tls-keygen

you would need node js installed, so that's atleast 1 installation requirement... node.js has as one of it's dependencies openSSL. So you could use openssl commands and have actually less installation requirements.

Still sounds good to me - it would do extra stuff like adding it to the Windows cert store if you're there, adding it to Firefox if you use it, etc. And being package it's better to collaborate on than everyone making their own process (and possibly screwing it up).

Since many people who run https://localhost are doing front end development node will probably already be there.

If you're on Windows then you get creating a certificate and adding it to the cert store out of the box with PowerShell[0].

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/pkiclient...

That's really useful - and worth submitting as a separate post.

> it would do extra stuff like adding it to the Windows cert store if you're there, adding it to Firefox if you use it, etc

This is what mkcert does (FF on Windows not done yet, but FF everywhere else and OS root store is).

> And being package it's better to collaborate on than everyone making their own process (and possibly screwing it up)

Not sure the difference between it being an npm package or a Go project on GitHub is that large. Or are you saying "go build" is easier to screw up than "npm install"?

EDIT: My mistake, misunderstood the context of the comment.

> This is what mkcert does

> Not sure the difference between it being an npm package or a Go project on GitHub is that large.

I know mkcert also does this. I also agree that other maintained projects are good too. My comment was in response was to it's parent, which reads:

> So you could use openssl commands and have actually less installation requirements.

I've been using minica [0] as recommended by letsencrypt [1] and am fairly happy with how easy it was to run and setup. I also like how small it is; I just embedded it in the development scripts of the project.

[0] https://github.com/jsha/minica

[1] https://letsencrypt.org/docs/certificates-for-localhost/

FYI, Windows support just got merged: https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/pull/46

Hello HN, author here! :)

Something I would love to collect some feedback on is: how would mkcert have to change, if at all, to support a production CA (for stuff like internal machines talking to each other)? Should it even try, or does a tool like minica do the trick there?

And please open an issue if it doesn’t just work on your dev machine!

It's funny how people seem to do the same thing at the same time. I recently made https://github.com/socketry/localhost however `mkcert` has lots of good ideas I'm going to "borrow" :)

I made my own variant of this as well, although it was just config files & shell scripts wrapping OpenSSL instead of being a custom binary.

Me too, but it was mostly to teach myself about OpenSSL, and I feel like the experience have scarred me for life.

I mostly used the Ruby C-bindings, and I feel like finding information and documentation was very difficult, and it was even harder to figure out if there was any best practices I was missing.

It baffles me that so important infrastructure is built upon something that feels this brittle, and it keeps me up at night :-)

Don’t worry, everyone who used OpenSSL APIs feels the same way as you do.

I've had good luck with caman (https://github.com/radiac/caman), but it doesn't do any of the fancy certificate installation bits. This looks neat and useful.

bash-based, looks good to me.

cfssl shell wrapper https://github.com/epcim/cfssl-pki

No installation required: https://certsimple.com/blog/localhost-ssl-fix

A few clicks and 1 actual command on macOS

The point of mkcert is so you can use it on any OS without a bunch of hoops to jump through.

Installation of a binary is also a hoop.

is there an advantage to this over using openssl or nss/certutil commands?

The main advantage to me would be "not having to remember openssl commands you use twice a year"...

seems a way to gather all kinds of extra clutter on your box. keep notes of things you do :-) it just requires a txt editor present in most operating systems by default. if you document carefuly, you can even just add #!/bin/sh in the top to automate ;D but it's atleast honest comment :D

I freely admit I'm bad at keeping notes - I've tried various systems over the years (from wikis to nvalt to evernote etc) and hated them all for one reason or another. And there is a limit to the usefulness of scripting it all, because I'll soon forget what the script was for, the inevitable pitfalls, what to change if I'm on another machine and so on. So this sort of very simple and natural interface can be appealing to me. Mind, I'll probably forget I've installed it and in 6 months time I'll have the same problem and I'll google openssl again...

Thats why I write a blog post to myself ;) https://daurnimator.com/post/115624714644/howto-generate-a-s...

Your blog post was about creating a self-signed TLS cert. mkcert is more than that, it creates the root CA first before creating self-signed certs and trusting them.

Indeed; but I was replying with my solution to the general problem of

> remember openssl commands you use twice a year

Also, this tool automates installation in the SO and Firefox's truststores.

For folks interested in the "minimal" aspect of this project, there is a similar one with a single Go file: https://github.com/jsha/minica

for embedded boxes golang is either unsupported there, or its binary is typical over-sized, a bash or C version of the same functionalities will be great there.

then you can have letsencrypt easily these days so probably we can use 'official certificate' even for local development these days?

i am always puzzled by some of those down-votes, i thought constructive thoughts are at least welcomed at HN. The fact is at HN unless you are saying "this is a great idea/project and you're awesome" or be totally neutral, any other thoughts such as a constructive one, not to mention a critical one, will always or at least very likely to get a down-vote.

it's pathetic, grow up, listen to both sides, technical discussion has its merits, embrace it.

if you're only looking to "this is great" comments at HN, there is no point being here at all.

Yes, some of you will down-vote this, to make your day.

It was not constructive. And let’s encrypt does not work for localhost.

Emoji is unnecessary and annoying.

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