A GitHub-native private certificate authority

For local development environments that need TLS certificates, it's useful to mimic public certificate authority behavior with a private CA that belongs to your organization.

This repo is a very simple wrapper around the openssl certificate signing command, which runs without dependencies inside of GitHub actions. You store your CA's private key as a repository secret, and signed certificates are stored as workflow run artifacts.

Important

Before continuing, create a new private repository in your GitHub organization using this repository as a template. Click the green "Use this template" button above.

If you've already completed setup, skip to the Get a signed cert section.

The following steps assume you have a POSIX-ish shell and openssl available on your local machine so make sure it's installed before proceeding. The included shell scripts also depend on tee and base64 with the flag -w0 but can be easily adapted if those aren't available.

Setup

You only need to do this once. Skip to the Get a signed cert section if you completed setup previously.

Create your CA key and cert

On your local machine, create a CA key and certificate, combined into a single file. You only need to do this once. Use the provided new-ca.sh shell script for convenience:

CA_NAME="Acme, Inc. Private CA" ./new-ca.sh

Configure GitHub

Create a repository secret named CA_KEY_AND_CERT with the contents of your combined CA key and certificate PEM file.

1. In GitHub, navigate to the settings page for actions secrets and variables
2. In the "Secrets" tab, select "New repository secret"
3. Name your secret CA_KEY_AND_CERT
4. Paste the contents of your combined CA key and certificate PEM file as the "Secret" value

Note that once you've stored the private key as a GitHub repository secret you can destroy the key on your local machine (just be sure to keep a copy of the CA cert). Your CA will then only exist inside of your GitHub repo.

Add your CA certificate to trust stores (optional but recommended)

Presuming you want your leaf ("server") certificates to be accepted as valid by TLS clients (i.e. web browsers, curl, etc.) you'll need to add the CA certificate created in step one (just the cert, not the combined key and cert) to the relevant "trust stores" in your development environment.

Get a signed cert

Create a private key and certificate signing request

On your local machine, create a new private key and use it to generate a CSR for whatever DNS name you want to appear in your signed cert. Use the provided new-csr.sh shell script for convenience:

DNS_NAME=www.example.com ./new-csr.sh

You'll need the private key to configure TLS for your server later, so make a note of its location. It's the file ending in .key.

Request a signed certificate

Certificates are signed using GitHub Actions. This repository includes a workflow named "sign" that you can initiate directly from the GitHub UI or API. In the UI, at the top of the workflow runs list, you should see a banner that reads "This workflow has a workflow_dispatch event trigger." To the right of that is a button named "Run workflow" which you can use to initiate a new signing request.

The only required input is a base64-encoded certificate signing request. If you used the provided shell script in the previous step then the CSR file ending in .b64 contains the data you need.

Run the workflow with your base64-encoded CSR as input. Assuming the run completes successfully your signed cert is available as a downloadable artifact from the workflow run details page.

Use the signed cert

Pop the private key and signed cert from the previous step into any server's TLS configuration and it should work.