Pow Over HTTPS

I use Pow to manage web servers on my development machine. It works pretty well. To start my server, I just hit a URL like https://surveyweb.dev, which starts the server (if it isn’t running) and spins it down automatically in 5 minutes.

It doesn’t work over HTTPS by default; here’s how you get that done.

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$ gem install tunnels

This gem lets you route traffic from one port to another port.

We need to route traffic from port 443, to port 80 (where the Pow server runs).

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$ sudo tunnels 443 80

While the tunnel is open, I can access https://surveyweb.dev just fine.

Pow also has a feature where I can access my server from another machine on the LAN using a URL like https://surveyweb.192.168.1.10.xip.io/ where 192.168.1.10 is the IP address of my machine. Even with the tunnel open, HTTPS doesn’t work for this URL.

We need to start another tunnel:

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$ sudo tunnels 192.168.1.10:443 127.0.0.1:80 # Replace 192.168.1.10 with your IP address

And now, both URLs work over HTTPS.