While working with our code, we often need to quickly check if something works under HTTPS — or more importantly, how it behaves under HTTPS. There are plenty of guides online showing you how to create a Certificate Sign Request (CSR), how to self-sign that CSR, and how to manually modify your web server’s configuration to make it use that certificate.
In this article, I will present a fully-automated process using Docker to quickly spin up an NGINX container with a self-signed certificate — all without having to generate or manually edit anything at all!
Security note and warning
- A self-signed certificate can only be trusted by… you. It is not a means to serve data in a production environment; use a proper certificate in such cases.
- The NGINX configuration to serve content under HTTPS presented in this article is the bare minimum to get the job done. If you want to modify a production NGINX with TLS, please consult the official guide.
If you are just starting with Public Key Cryptography, I have written an introduction article you might find useful.