It’s not the first time I had to use HTTPS for local development and had to do the whole setup of self-signed certificates. It’s a painful process that doesn’t have a good ROI for the developer.

One day, after being sick of doing this every time, I decided to do some research for an easy way to workaround this. That was when I found the thisisunsafe hack.

If you’re using Chrome (or chromium) you can type thisisunsafe when you access your development app complaining about HTTPS certificates. Chrome will then bypass the HTTPS checks and just let you use it. 🎉

You may be asking yourself: “Where do I type this? The address bar?”. It may look weird, but you type it anywhere in the page. You don’t even see what you typed. It’s not user-friendly on purpose. :)

This was life-changer for me. No more self-signed certificates.

PS: keep in mind that this trick must only be used for your development environment! Do not use it for real sites on the internet.

I wish I had something like that for Firefox, but unfortunately I couldn’t find an alternative that is quick and dirty like that. Meanwhile, I will just use chromium when developing an app that needs this.