On

I've been using Teams Yeoman generator for quite a long time , also I've one contribution to this awesome opensource project.
However, I've always wondered why it's running on local http while the manifest is requiring the tabs endpoint to be an https endpoint, so If you are building a Microsoft Teams tab, you won't be able to run it locally without enabling https to your local server.
The method I used to get around this is using ngrok and use the https endpoint, but deep inside I didn't want to expose my local tab code to run externally, maybe someone out there is trying out all the possible ~4.2 billion possible sub-domains 16^8 (nah just kidding). I think I was just determined to run tabs locally using https server.

So I've updated my fork with the latest updates since my last contribution (almost a year ago), then did the following steps to make the generator creates https local server
  1. I've create new local branch and called it https (very creative name !)
  2. I've noticed I need to generate certificate and private key using openssl command (you can either install openssl.exe win 32/64 binary or run openssl through Ubuntu on windows 10  if you have a windows machine
  3. I've placed the two files in a cert folder under the main app template which is common across all Yo Teams artefacts
  4. I've used a webpack plugin "copy-webpack-plugin" to allow me to copy the cert folder
  5. To make sure that webpack will spit out my two files I've added the following line to the webpack server entry under plugins, don't forget to install copy-webpack-plugin package 

  6. Now to the fun and easy part, which is changing the server.ts class, first change import * as http from http to "https" and then replace the server creation with the following lines
  7. to run this version of the generator , run npm link
  8. now link your folder with the new generator, run it and when you type gulp serve, an https server will be created and you can use local server to run