I am the owner of lvh.me. And I'm glad to hear it's helpful. In truth, it's just a fancy DNS trick. lhv.me and all of it's sub-domains just point back to your computer (127.0.0.1). That means running ssl is as simple (or difficult) as running ssl on your computer.
I'm not sure how comfortable you are with the command line, but here's my how I setup my development environment. (rvm, passenger, nginx w/ SSL, etc).
bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head ) source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm rvm install ree-1.8.7-2010.02 rvm ree --passenger sudo mkdir -p /opt && sudo chown -R $USER /opt passenger-install-nginx-module --auto --prefix=/opt/nginx/ --auto-download --extra-configure-flags=--with-http_ssl_module
curl http://www.selfsignedcertificate.com/download.php?file=28727991/www.example.com.key > /opt/nginx/conf/server.key
curl http://www.selfsignedcertificate.com/download.php?file=28727991/www.example.com.cert > /opt/nginx/conf/server.crt
http {
passenger_root /Users/levi/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2010.02/gems/passenger-2.2.15; passenger_ruby /Users/levi/.rvm/bin/passenger_ruby; passenger_pool_idle_time 3600; # keep apps alive
server { listen 80; server_name foo.lvh.me; root /Users/levi/projects/foo/public; passenger_enabled on; rails_env development; }
server { listen 443; ssl on; ssl_certificate /opt/nginx/conf/server.crt; ssl_certificate_key /opt/nginx/conf/server.key; server_name foo.lvh.me; root /Users/levi/projects/foo/public; passenger_enabled on; rails_env development; } }
sudo /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx
sudo /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx -s stop