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What do you use for SSL on development domains?

Web Hosting by armstrongvds 29 replies 2.7K views
#1

My local.test certs keep expiring every 30 days and it's driving me nuts! I was using a self-signed setup but the browser warnings are endless. Looked at mkcert which seems sweet but needs root trust store install on every machine.

For our team we have ~20 devs on ARM Ampere workstations (insane value, runs circles around x86 for the price!) and I want something that scales without everyone running manual steps.

Currently considering:

  • Mkcert per dev + internal CA
  • Let's Encrypt staging (rate limits scare me)
  • Wildcard cert for *.dev.company.com

What works for you folks?

one small ping for man...
#2

Armstrongvds: wildcard cert shared to 20 devs is a key compromise waiting to happen.

Use mkcert. Automate trust store install with your config management. Problem solved.

#3

Hey folks, jumping in to keep this on track

@armstrongvds our security team vetoed the wildcard approach last quarter. Their reasoning: any compromised dev laptop = valid cert for everything. Hard to rotate quickly.

Mkcert with a shared internal CA cert (not key!) is what most teams land on. One-time trust install, then per-dev certs auto-generated. Light touch for admins, zero cost.

Let's Encrypt staging works but the 30-day cert lifetime becomes your new expiration problem. Fine for CI, tedious for laptops.

~be kind or be gone~
#4

Mkcert on Ampere Altra:

$ openssl speed rsa2048
                  sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
rsa 2048 bits 0.000456s 0.000014s   2192.9  71428.6

$ mkcert -install
Created a new local CA
The local CA is now installed in the system trust store!

$ mkcert devsite.test "*.devsite.test"
Using the local CA at /home/dev/.local/share/mkcert

Created a new certificate valid for the following names
 - "devsite.test"
 - "*.devsite.test"

The certificate is at "./devsite.test+1.pem"

Decent disk IO, meh network. CA generation 2.2k signs/sec. One-time hit.

Comparison:

  • Self-signed: manual browser exceptions, unscalable
  • LE staging: 30d expiry, external dependency
  • Mkcert: 825-day local certs, offline, free
  • Wildcard shared: key distribution nightmare

fio, iperf, geekbench. results or gtfo.
#5

Same .test expiry problem. I just renewed mine again last week

#6

2.2k signs/sec on Altra? I want to see that benchmarked against the M2

#7

Has anyone tried Vultr's dev-tier CA? They have an API for short-lived certs that doesn't need ACME polling.

kat_fold said:
Mkcert with a shared internal CA cert (not key!) is what most teams land on.

We did this for a while but onboarding new hires still meant a support ticket to get the root into their trust store. Not terrible, just another step.

What I actually want is something that works inside Docker without volume-mounting secrets everywhere. The mkcert approach gets messy when your containers are ephemeral.

Did you ever solve the ARM build issue for the CA tooling or are you just running x86 binaries under emulation

SPF, DKIM, DMARC — holy trinity ✉️
#8
kat_fold said:
Mkcert with a shared internal CA cert (not key!) is what most teams land on. One-time trust install, then per-dev certs auto-generated. Light touch for admins, zero cost.

This is where we landed too. Puppet drops the CA cert on first boot, devs never think about it again.

Still curious about the ARM angle though — anyone running mkcert's cert generation at scale on Ampere? Our Ansible run is noticeably slower than on our old x86 boxes and I'm wondering if it's the crypto ops or just IO.

one small ping for man...
#9

Has anyone actually tried the GreenCloudVPS managed CA for dev environments? They have an internal offering that hooks into ACME and claims zero trust-store fiddling, but I can't find a pricing page and their sales bot ghosted me after one email — https://greencloudvps.com

Curious if it's real or just vaporware at this point

#10

Van3 — I think you meant to post that in the Ampere benchmark thread? This one's about SSL tooling.

Anyway, armstrongvds, did you ever solve this? Curious if your security team ended up okay with the mkcert shared CA route or if they pushed for something else. We've had a few teams at Contabo go the internal ACME route with KnownHost's smallstep CA and it's been smooth, but that's probably overkill for 20 devs.

~be kind or be gone~

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