Laravel php artisan serve to mimic HTTPS

Question

I have been searching around to see if there is a way I can mock SSL for local development using Laravel\'s artisan to serve HTTPS with no luck.

Is this possible and

Answer 1

Laravel uses the in-built PHP5.4 development server php -S (http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver.php) for it's artisan serve command (see Illuminate\Foundation\Console\ServeCommand). This only supports plain HTTP, so no, this isn't possible. Your best bet would be to use a Vagrant box set up to work with SSL/TLS.

Answer 2

If you're using xampp, then you can setup HTTPS locally with xampp (this post is also useful for setting up HTTPS) and then you can:

1. move your project to htdocs folder and visit it with https://localhost/projectFolder/public/

2. or just create a special VirtualHost in httpd-vhosts.conf for this project (always point to that public folder, this is from where the project is running) and then visit it with https://localhost/ in this example (you can of course, run it on a subdomain if you want to)

   <VirtualHost *:80>
       ServerName localhost
       DocumentRoot "c:\pathToYourProject\projectFolder\public"
       <Directory "c:\pathToYourProject\projectFolder\public">
           Options All
           AllowOverride All
       </Directory>
   </VirtualHost>
   
   # this should ensure https (this is mentioned in the stackoverflow post, that I linked as useful
   <VirtualHost *:443>
       ServerName localhost
       DocumentRoot "c:\pathToYourProject\projectFolder\public"
       SSLEngine on
       SSLCertificateFile "conf\ssl.crt\server.crt"
       SSLCertificateKeyFile "conf\ssl.key\server.key"
       <Directory "c:\pathToYourProject\projectFolder\public">
           Options All
           AllowOverride All
       </Directory>
   </VirtualHost>
   

Theoretically, when you're using this method, you don't even need php artisan serve (tbh I'm not entirely sure if it has any purpose in this case).

Answer 3

You can use ngrok for that

php artisan serve
cd <path-to-ngrok>
./ngrok http localhost:8000

https://ngrok.com/