Instant HTTPS your localhost with Caddy

Here's an interesting thing that I've learned about running localhost on HTTPS protocol almost instantly.

You can install it using Brew by running the following command

brew install caddy

And once the installation is done. You can run localhost on HTTPS by reverse proxying it.

You can do it in two ways.

Running Caddy Reverse Proxy with CLI

Start your local dev server. In my case, it's running in port 3001. Then we can reverse proxy it with the following command

caddy reverse-proxy --from example.localhost  --to localhost:3001

If you're doing it for the first time, then it'll ask for a password for your machine to set up Caddy's CA. Make sure to enter it to setup properly.

Create a new Caddyfile and configure your reverse proxy

example.localhost { 
    reverse_proxy localhost:3001
}

And then run the following command to start the reverse proxy

caddy run

If you want to run it in the background (daemon mode), run the following command instead

caddy start

Happy HTTPS localhosts!