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Last active February 25, 2024 17:35
How to set up stress-free SSL on an OS X development machine

How to set up stress-free SSL on an OS X development machine

One of the best ways to reduce complexity (read: stress) in web development is to minimize the differences between your development and production environments. After being frustrated by attempts to unify the approach to SSL on my local machine and in production, I searched for a workflow that would make the protocol invisible to me between all environments.

Most workflows make the following compromises:

  • Use HTTPS in production but HTTP locally. This is annoying because it makes the environments inconsistent, and the protocol choices leak up into the stack. For example, your web application needs to understand the underlying protocol when using the secure flag for cookies. If you don't get this right, your HTTP development server won't be able to read the cookies it writes, or worse, your HTTPS production server could pass sensitive cookies over an insecure connection.

  • Use production SSL certificates locally. This is annoying

Build your own private, encrypted, open-source Dropbox-esque sync folder

Prerequisites:

  • One or more clients running a UNIX-like OS. Examples are given for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, although all software components are available for other platforms as well (e.g. OS X). YMMV
  • A cheap Ubuntu 12.04 VPS with storage. I recommend Backupsy, they offer 250GB storage for $5/month. Ask Google for coupon codes.

Software components used:

  • Unison for file synchronization
  • EncFS for folder encryption