Custom Domain on Localhost with HTTPS
We all run our webservers on localhost during development. Have you wondered how we can add custom domain and serve the site over https? In this blog post, we will see how to set this up in Windows and WSL (version 2). I believe the steps would be similar for MacOS and Linux. Let’s get started. Prerequisites Before we begin, make sure you have: Python and Flask installed: pip install flask OpenSSL installed: In WSL, run sudo apt-get install openssl Administrator privileges on Windows (for editing hosts file and installing certificates) Basic understanding of web servers and HTTP/HTTPS concepts TLDR: High level steps Add custom domain mapping in your system’s hosts file. This redirects your custom domain to localhost. Generate a self-signed certificate using OpenSSL. This provides SSL/TLS encryption for HTTPS. Trust the certificate in your system’s certificate store to avoid browser warnings. Configure your web server to use the certificate and serve content over HTTPS. Step 0: Boot up some server Let’s start any webserver. I like to use python’s flask for this. You are free to use other approaches like nginx. ...