While answering a couple of Stack Overflow questions recently I needed to create some certificates to use with localhost so I thought I’d record

Test Certificates for localhost

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2021-09-27 16:30:04

While answering a couple of Stack Overflow questions recently I needed to create some certificates to use with localhost so I thought I’d record the steps to I would have something to link to next time.

Traditionally the certificates Subject’s CN value has contained the hostname of the machine the certificate is representing. But the spec doesn’t actually assign any specific meaning to this field and it was deprecated as part of RFC2818.

v3 or the x509 spec adds an extension for storing hostnames and IP addresses called Subject Alternative Names (known as SAN). The last line in the instructions adds SANs for the hostname localhost and the IP addresses 127.0.0.1 and ::1. This means it should be valid for all possible ways of accessing localhost.

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