Abusing a GitHub repo as a private certificate authority
I tend to create a private certificate authority for every side project, in order to create TLS certs for local development. I find it useful to have local development closely resemble production when at all possible, and "real" certificates are an important element. Anyway I got tired of having these CA private keys on my local machine, especially as I started thinking about setting up a private CA for my company (https://riza.io). So I started thinking about what the simplest way to host a private CA might be. You really only need two things: 1) secret storage, to hold the CA's…
In plain words
This tool uses a GitHub repository and GitHub Actions to operate as a private certificate authority for local development. It stores the CA private key in GitHub secrets and uses Actions to generate TLS certificates with OpenSSL, eliminating the need to keep sensitive keys on a local machine. Designed for developers who want their local development environments to closely match production by using real certificates instead of self-signed ones.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
I tend to create a private certificate authority for every side project, in order to create TLS certs for local development. I find it useful to have local development closely resemble production when at all possible, and "real" certificates are an important element. Anyway I got tired of having these CA private keys on my local machine, especially as I started thinking about setting up a private CA for my company (https://riza.io). So I started thinking about what the simplest way to host a private CA might be. You really only need two things: 1) secret storage, to hold the CA's private key, and 2) a computer with access to the secret that can run openssl. It turns out that a GitHub repository has secret storage, and GitHub Actions provides a computer with access to that secret storage which can run openssl. So I made a GitHub repo with a stupid-simple workflow and a couple of convenience shell scripts to use as a private CA. I've already used it as a template repo to host private CA's for my projects, and thought it might be useful to others.
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