Your First Week With Node.js

Chapter 8: How to Use SSL/TLS with Node.js

by Florian Rappl & Almir Bijedic

In this article, I’ll work through a practical example of how to add a Let’s Encrypt-generated certificate to your Express.js server.

But protecting our sites and apps with HTTPS isn’t enough. We should also demand encrypted connections from the servers we’re talking to. We’ll see that possibilities exist to activate the SSL/TLS layer even if it wouldn’t be enabled by default.

Let’s start with a short review of HTTPS’s current state.

HTTPS Everywhere

The HTTP/2 specification was published as RFC 7540 in May 2015, which means at this point it’s a part of the standard. This was a major milestone. Now we can all upgrade our servers to use HTTP/2. One of the most important ...