If you’ve ever tried to set up HTTPS locally for development, you’ve probably run into a wall of complexity. Generating a self-signed certificate, getting your browser to trust it, and dealing with the warnings can be a real pain, that’s where mkcert comes in.
mkcert is a simple tool that lets developers and sysadmins create locally-trusted SSL certificates for development and testing, which eliminates the annoying browser warnings, and yes, it’s free, open-source, and works beautifully on Linux.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through what mkcert is, how it works, how to install it, and how to use it effectively in a Linux environment.