We built an app to expose your localhost to a public HTTPS URL, here's how it's built and what we learned along the way.
datum-cloud/app
A desktop app for safely exposing local services on the Internet via Iroh tunnels using QUIC. Built in rust.
Matt Pocock on Twitter / X
I want:A Desktop app I can open (on Windows)That runs a local dev server on localhost:3000And turns the app into a desktop appDoes this exist?— Matt Pocock (@mattpocockuk) July 28, 2025
Requirements for HTTPS for Local Domains
When connecting to servers on their local network, users are surprised to encounter user interfaces that display errors, show insecure connections, and block some HTTP features when missing a secure context. However, obtaining PKIX certificates for those servers is difficult for a variety of reasons. This document explores requirements for authenticating local servers.
zeroserve: a zero-config web server you can script with eBPF
zeroserve is a small, fast, zero-config HTTPS server. You hand it a tarball of a website and it serves it - over HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, with hot reload and a tiny resident footprint. The twist is that you can drop eBPF programs into the tarball and they run on every request, in userspace, as sandboxed middleware - rewriting, authenticating, and rate-limiting requests, or reverse-proxying them to a backend when you want it to act as a gateway in front of your app.
Caddy - The Ultimate Server with Automatic HTTPS
Caddy is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go
A quick look at every link that's been added thus far.
Multiple protocols, dozens of apps, dozens more use cases. So where do you or I start? It's simple I promise. Mayhaps a little overwhelming to see this quick post alongside 50 and counting...
Developer Docs · aturi.to
Add Atmosphere “Open in…” links, smart client recommendations, and AT-URI resolution to your own app with the @aturi.to/waypoints packages and the public Resolve API.
Webxdc: mini apps shared in a chat
Secure mini apps for chats. No internet access, no tracking, no servers.
Singi Labs
Open source foundations for networked apps. Singi Labs has 13 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.
Some Secret Management Belongs in Your HTTP Proxy - exe.dev blog
do third-party integrations via HTTP header management
mitmproxy - an interactive HTTPS proxy
mitmproxy is your swiss-army knife for debugging, testing, privacy measurements, and penetration testing. It can be used to intercept, inspect, modify and replay web traffic such as HTTP/1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSockets, or any other SSL/TLS-protected protocols. You can prettify and decode a variety of message types ranging from HTML to Protobuf, intercept specific messages on-the-fly, modify them before they reach their destination, and replay them to a client or server later on.
Bonsai 1-bit WebGPU - a Hugging Face Space by webml-community
Run 1-bit Bonsai LLMs locally in your browser on WebGPU
was it loaded via http+dns+ssl? then it's server-first. (which is not bad. but it's not the local-first i want.)
Jake Lazaroff
this looks very cool, i mean that genuinely, but tbh i bristle a bit seeing "local-first" used as a straw man here. of course if your server is the source of truth you can eliminate a lot of local-first complexity — the entire point of that complexity is to avoid a server-authoritative architecture!
Hoping @letta.com is still on everyones Radar. They somewhat recently added & then massively expanded support for a local mode. w/ app-server mode it seems like virtually all capabilities they advertise can now be self hosted on your own LLM. The product is insanely good! So happy they did this.
