Can I Get Letsencrypt Certificate for Local Development

Question

Right now I'm using self-signed HTTPS certificates for local development and Letsencrypt certificates in production. Is it possible to use Letsencrypt certificates for local development as well? For domains like local.mydomain.com?

I think it's not possible because my local website is not publicly accessible from the outside and therefore Letsencrypt cannot do ACME challenge.

So is there a way to get Letsencrypt certificates locally, or it's not intended to work like that and I should stick with self-signed certificates?

Accepted Answer

Yes!

You absolutely can!

Let’s Encrypt is not only intended for local development certificates, but also many IoT and on-prem Enterprise solutions that are on private networks, unreachable using the HTTP-01 in production as well.

TXT records: DNS-01 challenge

There are three ways to validate a domain:

HTTP-01 over plain HTTP on port 80
TLS-ALPN-01 over TLS v1.2+ on port 443
DNS-01 over UDP/TCP on port 53

For the DNS challenge you can either manually set a DNS record every so often, or use an automated plugin built specifically for your DNS provider.

Greenlock - a client for all ENVs

I’m the author of Greenlock, which is similar to certbot, but written in plain JavaScript and more geared towards those three use cases I mentioned before:

local development
IoT
Enterprise On-Prem

Must Read

Try it in your Browser:

Since it’s written in JavaScript, you can try it out right in your web browser, using the manual method: