Most of us lock our houses and cars, and we even put a lock of sorts on our digital wallets. Everyone has heard stories of major data breaches, yet people often try running local Acumatica instances without the most basic of protection of an SSL certificate. While the documentation for Acumatica says self-signed certificates are not supported, creating one that works (at the time of this writing) and using it is very easy.
First, what is an SSL certificate? SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. In simple terms, it is a key that locks the door to your data. While locks can be picked, SSL makes it very challenging to “break the code” and get your data. Without it, online banking would be impossible because every bank account would be hacked.
To use an SSL certificate, first you must create one. For personal use on your local computer, a simple self-signed certificate will do. To get started, open PowerShell as an admin user. Just search for powershell in the search box of Windows and select “Run as Administrator”.
Next, we will run a command to create the certificate.
New-SelfSignedCertificate -DnsName "localhost" -CertStoreLocation "cert:\LocalMachine\My"This will create the certificate for localhost (your local computer) and store it into the proper certificate store for our purposes.
Next, open IIS Manager. Just search for iis in the search box of Windows.
Navigate to your website on the left panel and then click on Bindings on the right panel. Double-click on https or click edit on the right panel. (If https is not listed, click Add, and you can add it.) Select localhost (which you just made) for the certificate and click ok.
Congratulations. Your local Acumatica instance should be ready to access using your new SSL certificate. Just remember to prefix the URL with https instead of http.
Happy coding!