Author’s note

This post was recovered from my old blog via the Wayback Machine. This particular post is the only thing I could recover from 2011.

@jbnunn

25-Sept 2022

Setup SSL in your local development environment with XAMPP - Mar 24 2011

Need SSL for you dev work? I constantly found myself needing a “fake” SSL certificate for local development so my local setup could match my remote setups. Here’s how to do it with XAMPP on a Mac.

Drop into Terminal, and generate a private key:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024

Generate the CSR and fill out the form (note, don’t worry about a challenge password (the 8th question)

openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr

Configure SSL in httpd.conf for Apache:

cd /Applications/XAMPP/etc
sudo nano httpd.conf

Search for “# Secure (SSL/TLS) connections” (line 480), uncomment

Include /Applications/XAMPP/etc/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

Save the file, open /Applications/XAMPP/etc/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

sudo nano /Applications/XAMPP/etc/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

Edit the path to your certificate file created above. Around line 99 look for

SSLCertificateFile /Applications/XAMPP/etc/ssl.crt/server.crt

Make sure to place the server.crt file in the XAMPP/etc/ssl.crt directory.

sudo cp ~/server.crt /Applications/XAMPP/etc/ssl.crt/server.crt

Do the same for your “SSLCertificateKeyFile” (line 107)

sudo cp ~/server.key /Applications/XAMPP/etc/ssl.crt/server.key

Done. Use your XAMPP Control Panel to restart Apache and you’ll have SSL working locally