Creating an SSL Developer Certificate

Harmony Core defaults to requiring HTTPS communication between consumers and the Harmony Core service, and to be able to use HTTP on a local development system it is necessary to obtain, install and trust an HTTPS certificate. Most development systems use a "self-signed" certificate for this purpose, and fortunately, the .NET Core SDK now has tooling to make the creation, installation and trusting of such a certificate very easy.

In a command prompt window, execute the following command to generate and install a self-signed HTTPS certificate on your local system:

    dotnet dev-certs https

You may see a message saying “A valid HTTPS certificate is already present”. If so, no problem, you already have a certificate.

Trusting the HTTPS Developer Certificate

Having created a self signed HTTPS certificate the next step is to register the certificate as trusted on your local system.

Execute the following command:

    dotnet dev-certs https --trust

If no certificate was previously trusted then you’ll see a confirmation dialog, and should click the Yes button to trust the certificate.

If your developer certificate is already trusted you will see a message similar to this:

    A valid HTTPS certificate is already present.

In this case, no further action is needed.

Removing the HTTPS Certificate

If at any time you wish to remove the self-signed HTTPS certificate from your system, you can do so by executing the following command:

    dotnet dev-certs --clean

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Next topic: Creating a Demo Solution

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