How to create self-signed certificate

Intro

Based on experience in some scenarios you would debug your applications with certificate using https on your localhost.

If you are using latest version of react-script you are good, since its automatically creates self-signed certificate. But in another scenarios you would want to install it manually. Please read my tutorial below if you want to generate and install cert for Windows/OSX.

To debug your app locally for web client/desktop environments using secure protocol https you will need to add a certificate for localhost to Trusted Root Certification Authorities catalog.

Trusting the SSL certificate

1. Open the Chrome Developer Tools window (ctrl + shift + i / cmd + option + i).
2. Click on the Security tab
3. Click on View certificate and you’ll have the option to download the certificate — either by dragging it to your desktop in OS X, or by clicking on the Details tab in Windows and clicking Copy to File…

Install/trust certificate on Windows

1. Choose the DER encoded binary X.509 (.CER) option (the first one) and save it.
2. Double click on the certificate and install it.
3. Choose Local Machine
4. Select Place all certificates in the following store
5. Choose Trusted Root Certification Authorities
6. Confirm your installation

Install/trust certificate on Mac OS X

1. On OS X, open the Keychain Access utility and select System from the menu on the left. Click the lock icon to enable changes.
2. Click the plus button near the bottom to add a new certificate, and select the localhost.cer file you dragged to the desktop. Click Always Trust in the dialog that appears.
3. After adding the certificate to the system keychain, double-click the certificate and expand the Trust section of the certificate details. Select Always Trust for every option.

P.S. if you still have certificate warning issue in browser, you should to reboot your machine.

Happy creating self-signed certificate! :)