Top 10 Local HTTPS and Tunneling Tools

Hi everyone, welcome back. Today, I will be going over local HTTPS and tunneling tools — mkcert, Caddy, OpenSSL, Cloudflare Tunnel, ngrok, Tailscale Serve and Funnel, frp, bore, SSH remote port forwarding, and Let’s Encrypt with DNS-01.

There are two different problems hiding in one request, and reaching for a tunnel when you needed a certificate is why this subject feels confusing. Making your browser trust your local site is a trust-store problem, solved on your own machine. Letting an outside service reach your laptop is a reachability problem, solved with someone else’s server, because the thing in your way is a router that drops inbound packets. Work out which one you have first.

A second thread runs through every tunnel below: a tunnel is an inbound path into a machine on your network, usually with nothing authenticating in front of it. “It is just for a minute” is how a development database ends up indexed.

Photo by Árpád Czapp on Unsplash

1. mkcert

mkcert creates a development CA, installs it in your trust stores, and issues certificates from it.

# create the local CA and add it to the system trust store
mkcert -install

# one certificate for all three names
mkcert example.com localhost 127.0.0.1

# where the CA key lives
mkcert -CAROOT