Disabling HSTS for localhost on Chromium-based browsers
Http Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a security mechanism that instructs the browser to automatically redirect http requests to https before sending a request to the server. When you are developing a web application, you should disable HSTS for localhost. This is because enabling HSTS on localhost has implications for other applications. For instance, some applications start a local web server and open a browser. However, they cannot use a certificate, so they cannot use https
. If a website enables HSTS on localhost
once, these applications won't work as they are not listening on https
.
#Clearing HSTS policy manually
You can open the page about://net-internals/#hsts
in the browser and clear HSTS data for localhost
:
#Using another domain for development
HSTS is per domain. So, you can use another domain for development. For instance, you can use myapp.local
instead of localhost
. This way, even if the app is using HSTS, it won't affect other applications using localhost
. To set up a domain, you need to edit the HOSTS file:
127.0.0.1 myapp.local
Then, you can use https://myapp.local
in your browser.
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