Because Harbor does not ship with any certificates, it uses HTTP by default to serve registry requests. However, it is highly recommended that security be enabled for any production environment. Harbor has an Nginx instance as a reverse proxy for all services, you can use the prepare script to configure Nginx to enable https.
In a test or development environment, you may choose to use a self-signed certificate instead of the one from a trusted third-party CA. The followings will show you how to create your own CA, and use your CA to sign a server certificate and a client certificate.
Assuming that your registry's **hostname** is **yourdomain.com**, and that its DNS record points to the host where you are running Harbor. In production environment, you first should get a certificate from a CA. In a test or development environment, you can use your own CA. The certificate usually contains a .crt file and a .key file, for example, **yourdomain.com.crt** and **yourdomain.com.key**.
**3) Generate the certificate of your registry host:**
Whether you're using FQDN like **yourdomain.com** or IP to connect your registry host, run this command to generate the certificate of your registry host which comply with Subject Alternative Name (SAN) and x509 v3 extension requirement:
* Open a browser and enter the address: https://yourdomain.com. It should display the user interface of Harbor.
* Notice that some browser may still shows the warning regarding Certificate Authority (CA) unknown for security reason even though we signed certificates by self-signed CA and deploy the CA to the place mentioned above. It is because self-signed CA essentially is not a trusted third-party CA. You can import the CA to the browser on your own to solve the warning.
* If you mapped nginx port 443 to another port, then you should instead create the directory ```/etc/docker/certs.d/yourdomain.com:port``` (or your registry host IP:port). Then run any docker command to verify the setup, e.g.
1. You may get an intermediate certificate from a certificate issuer. In this case, you should merge the intermediate certificate with your own certificate to create a certificate bundle. You can achieve this by the below command: