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Securing Sites with TLS

By default, Herd serves sites over HTTP. However, if you would like to serve a site over encrypted TLS using HTTP/2, you may secure your sites. This is sometimes necessary when working with redirect URLs and other scenarios.

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Via the GUI

You can secure/unsecure a site in the “Sites” tab of the preferences window. This gives you a list of all your sites and allows you to toggle the secured status of each site.

When a closed lock icon is shown, the site is secured. When an open lock icon is shown, the site is unsecured.

Enabling the checkbox for HTTPS creates a local TLS certificate for your domain.

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Via the CLI

If you prefer to use the CLI, you can use the herd secure command to secure/unsecure a site. For example, if Herd serves your site via the example-site.test domain, you need run the following command to secure it:

herd secure example-site

To “unsecure” a site and revert back to serving its traffic over plain HTTP, use the unsecore command. Like the secure command, this command accepts the sitename that you wish to unsecure:

herd unsecure example-site

After unsecuring a site, you man need to restart your browser session because many browsers like Google Chrome cache redirects to HTTPS and will give you a hard time.

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Listing all secure sites

The Herd CLI has a command to list all sites that have a local TLS certificate. You may want to use that for debugging purposes.

herd secured

This gives you a similar output to this:

+----------------------------+----------------------------+
| Site                       | Valid Until                |
+----------------------------+----------------------------+
| expose.dev.test            | 2024-08-10 12:07:38 GMT    |
| herd-templates.test        | 2024-09-05 25:12:77 GMT    |
| reverb-110.test            | 2024-09-11 13:44:56 GMT    |
| tinkerwell.app.test        | 2024-10-16 19:53:32 GMT    |
+----------------------------+----------------------------+