For a test suite I need to create a local SSL-enabled HTTPS server in my Python project. I googled around and found various recipes using pyOpenSSL, but all of those are quite complicated, and I didn’t even get the referenced one to work.

Also, Python has shipped its own built-in SSL module for quite a while. After reading some docs and playing around, I eventually got it to work with a remarkably simple piece of code using the builtin ssl module:

import BaseHTTPServer, SimpleHTTPServer
import ssl

httpd = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(('localhost', 4443), SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler)
httpd.socket = ssl.wrap_socket (httpd.socket, certfile='path/to/localhost.pem', server_side=True)
httpd.serve_forever()

(I use port 4443 so that I can run the tests as normal user; the usual port 443 requires root privileges).

Way to go, Python!