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…
Abusing a GitHub repo as a private certificate authority launched on May 18, 2024 with 26 votes, #786 of 4,539 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.
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
A GitHub-native private certificate authority. Contribute to andrewmbenton/ca development by creating an account on GitHub.
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…
Does a similar job
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My Private GitHub on PostgresMay 2026 · github.com · ▲42A private GitHub on Postgres. Contribute to calebwin/gitgres development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Morning HN. I had an issue recently where I wanted to share some private Github repositories with a larger audience than usual (25k+) on Youtube and was simply considering making my code public. Came up with an idea to build a middleman service that handles user access/management, generate share links and even paywall individual repos. Thought I might as well share here in case there's another dev out there who might be interested in sharing a private repo. Keen to get any feedback as I'm currently building
Open-source certificate from GitHub activityJan 2026 · certificate.brendonmatos.com · ▲43I built this as a small side project to learn and experiment, and I ended up with this! I used a subdomain from my personal portfolio, and everything else runs on free tiers. The project uses Nuxt, SVG, Cloudflare Workers, D1 (SQL), KV, Terraform, and some agentic coding with OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. What started as a joke among friends turned into a fun excuse to build something end to end, from zero to production, and to explore a few things I’d never touched before. I’d really appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
I made a tool, create GitHub Repository from local directory directly2023 · github.com · ▲38Create a remote repository directly from your local folder to GitHub.
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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
