What's a simple way to serve http://localhost as https://someOtherDomain? - apache

Question

I run a local development web server for testing out code changes.
Often I have to test my local changes with remote services that can only connect securely to another domain.
e.g. https://external1.com will only talk to https://someOtherDomain.com, but I've got to test integration of my new code changes with https://external1.com
While I've got a setup configured that works, it seems complex, and took a bit to get setup right. It seems to me that many developers would want to do this same thing, so my question is this:
Is there an easy way to proxy my local webserver as https://someOtherDomain.com ?
EDIT: So maybe this should be asked this way - Does a command line or GUI tool exist that you can pass a local port and a domain name, and it serves your local port securely over https://someOtherDomain.com - no config or SSL cert creation required? Of course it'd be nice if the SSL cert could be replaced through configuration if need be, but by default, it'd work automatically, by using a precanned SSL cert. And even though I'm using Apache, I'm looking for a solution that actually doesnt use Apache - it uses something else. Why? Because I want this solution to work well with any other webserver that's being used by people on our team - as we all run different stacks, and I'd like to be able to let any of us securely serve our sites without having to configure each webserver individually.
Here's my current setup for taking my local webserver and serving it up at https://www.someOtherDomain.com
To test this locally, I've been:
editing my hosts file, and adding an entry to make www.someOtherDomain.com point to my local machine, which of course is running my dev server. This makes it so my local site is now available at http://www.someOtherDomain.com
127.0.0.1 www.someOtherDomain.com
Running Apache with a SSL Cert setup and mod_proxy to redirect all https requests to my local http server, thus making my site available at https://www.someOtherDomain.com. Here's my Apache config for this:
ServerName www.someOtherDomain.com
<Location /balancer-manager>
SetHandler balancer-manager
</Location>
ProxyPass /balancer-manager !
ProxyPass / balancer://mycluster/
<Proxy balancer://mycluster>
BalancerMember http://localhost route=1
</Proxy>
ProxyPass / balancer://mycluster
ProxyPassReverse / balancer://mycluster
SSLHonorCipherOrder On
SSLProtocol -ALL +SSLv3 +TLSv1
SSLCipherSuite RC4-SHA:HIGH:!ADH
# Rewrite all http requests to https
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}
I run this on a mac, but am interested in solutions for linux as well. I've seen various Man in the Middle proxy's that sound like they'd work with some configuration... but I'm looking for something really simple to install and run - not just for me, but something I can tell team members about too, as we may all have to do this a lot in the future.
IMPORTANT NOTE: My local webserver isn't running on Port 80, though I've put it this way in the above example, to keep it simple. I understand port 80 on a mac is a bit special, but am very happy with solutions that work fine on all ports but port 80.

Answer 1

I think mitmproxy can do this for you, as least on linux and os-x. I haven't tried it myself but this question seems to show how it is done. It's still not a trivial program though.
There are however other approaches, which I have used:
The first one is the most pretty simple one, create a DNS entry for develop.mydomain.com which points to 127.0.0.1 and a single certificate for a (sub)domain where you control the DNS. Spread that certificate to all your developers. They'll still need to setup SSL themself but they don't need to generate certificates anymore. It has the added benefit that everybody is developing against https://develop.mydomain.com which allows them to share the configuration.
For bonus points, create a DNS entry for *.develop.mydomain.com and a wildcard certificate and your developers can have different sites (e.g. https://project1.develop.mydomain.com and https://project2.develop.mydomain.com) on there local machine. (Contrary to what the internet sometimes tells you, name based virtual hosting works fine with SSL as long as the certificate is valid for all the named hosts). Since the domain is the same for everybody you can consider getting a valid wildcard certificate to get rid of the warnings.
Unlike the solutions below this works even outside of the office network, which may be relevant when people are working from home or at the customer.
Building on this you could also create DNS entries for the internal IP's of the developer machines (if those are fixed). This does add some work, but it means the ongoing work of a developer can be reached by others in the local network, which can be very convenient for demo's, testing on mobile devices, etc.
An other option is to configure a single machine to proxy for all your developers. Create a DNS entry pointing to the internal IP of this box on something like *.develop.mydomain.com, a matching wildcard certificate and configure that box once with the correct certificate. Now you can create a virtual host for each proxied server, and again, all sites will be reachable throughout the local network, but it does require the developer to have fixed ip addresses (or hostnames added to DNS through DHCP).
Combined with the ability of apache to include all files in a directory in it's configuration makes it trivial to create a script which adds a new site based on a template. All it has to do is write a new file based on the requested subdomain plus the destination and reload the apache config. This means something like a simple PHP script can do what you want the application to do.

Answer 2

If you want to expose your web on your local machine to the internet try Runscope Passageway, it's easy to setup and "just works" (from experience).
Another alternative is ngrok which I also used, but it didn't always work for me.