Developing with SSL

Web development is something I do infrequently (it doesn’t feature in my day job), meaning some of the industry trends tend to pass me by. The restriction that some JavaScript client APIs are only available over HTTPS¹ is one such trend I had missed.

Encountering this restriction, I had assumed that it would be extremely difficult to set up HTTPS server locally for development. It turns out, however, it’s very easy using Flask (my go-to lightweight Python server of choice): simply passing ssl_context='adhoc' to the run method will dynamically generate, and use, an ad-hoc SSL certificate.

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(host='0.0.0.0', ssl_context='adhoc', port=4443)