Setup HTTPS with Nginx and Docker

Welcome back to my dev notes!

Today I was in trouble for a while because I wanted to setup HTTPS with Nginx and Docker and I completely forgot how to do it. So I decided to write down this guide to help me in the future and maybe it will help you too.

I have a Docker container running a PHP application served by Nginx and I wanted to setup HTTPS with a self-signed certificate because I need to test some OAuth flows.

Follow these steps to setup HTTPS with Nginx and Docker:

Create a self-signed certificate

openssl x509 -outform pem -in localhost.crt -out localhost.pem

Edit nginx configuration

Please take attention to the ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key files paths.

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name localhost;
  ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/localhost.crt;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/localhost.key;
  ...
}

Restart docker

If you are a perfectionist like me you can also add the certificate to your system keychain to avoid browser warnings. Using Mac OS you can do it like this:

sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain localhost.crt

Enjoy!