How to Create a Self-Signed Certificate With PowerShell [Snippet]

When we develop web-application or experiment with some technologies, it's quite common to need a certificate. A certificate for real world scenarios can be expensive, and it's over-engineering for testing purposes. So with this simple PowerShell script (on Windows), we can create a self-signed certificate for development enviroments.

$cert = New-SelfSignedCertificate -DnsName mydemowebapp.net -CertStoreLocation cert:\LocalMachine\My

$pwd = ConvertTo-SecureString -String "MyPassword" -Force -AsPlainText

Export-PfxCertificate -Cert $cert -FilePath C:\temp\cert.pfx -Password $pwd

With these few line of codes, we create and store a self-signed certificate in the Windows Certificate Store. With the last line (Export-PfxCertificate), we export the certificate for furher use for example to do some experiments with cloud providers.

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