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MAMP PRO Documentation

SSL

MAMP PRO - Sites - Site - SSL

To encrypt traffic from Apache or Nginx to a web browser, you can use SSL.

For a web browser to accept a site’s SSL certificate without showing a warning, the certificate must be signed by a special authority. Before creating the first own site, MAMP PRO creates such a special “MAMP PRO certificate” and stores it in the macOS keychain. This “MAMP PRO certificate” will be used to sign all future SSL certificates created by MAMP PRO.

This only works if the web browser uses the macOS keychain, such as Safari, Chrome, or Brave. Firefox and Edge do not use the keychain. For those browsers, you need to accept the site’s certificate once when accessing the site via HTTPS.

Since adding the “MAMP-PRO certificate” to the macOS keychain is a security-related action, the operating system will ask for the administrator name and password of the macOS user.

The “MAMP-PRO Certificate” has the name “MAMP_PRO_Root_CA” in the macOS keychain. You can view it and also manually delete it. It is automatically created and re-entered by MAMP PRO if necessary.

  • Enable SSL
    Enable this checkbox if you want your site to be accessible via HTTPS (https://).

    Note that this checkbox is automatically checked if you have specified a name ending in “.dev”, because this is a top-level domain whose registry has specified that only secure connections over HTTPS are allowed, so browsers automatically redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. More information about this top-level domain can be found at Wikipedia.

  • Certificate file
    Point to your certificate file. The file dialog will only show .crt files.

  • Certificate key file
    Point to your certificate key file. The file dialog will only show .key files.

  • Advanced Options

    • Chain file (Apache only)
      Point to your chain file or Alias.

    • Enforce TLS encryption, do not allow insecure methods
      Enabling this option prevents web browsers from using old and insecure SSL methods when connecting to this site. Only connections using TLS 1.2 and 1.3 will be accepted, TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, SSLv2 and SSLv3 connections are rejected. This is the recommended setting.

    • Allow to access this site via insecure http connections
      Enabling this option allows web browsers to also access ALL resources of this SSL site via http protocol. This is NOT a recommended setting.

      If you only want to make PARTS of the site accessible via http (i.e. static content like images), do NOT check this option but use the <Directory> or <VirtualHost> (Apache) or location or server (Nginx) directives in the appropriate tab or template file.

  • Create a new self-signed certificate…
    Use “Create a new self-signed certificate…” to test SSL functionality. Your browser will not recognize this certificate and you will have to click through warnings when viewing your site in a browser.

    MAMP PRO - SSL - Create a new self-signed certificate

    It is normal to get a warning when using a self-signed certificate created by MAMP PRO.