HappyLager Demo Site Forcing 'https://' on XAMPP

Question

When I try to load the demo site in my browser I get the following error:

https://imgur.com/8jVvweN "Your connection is not secure"

I have added the following to my hosts file:

127.0.0.7 happylager.dev

and this to my httpd-vhosts.conf file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot C:/xampp/htdocs/HappyLager/public/
    ServerName happylager.dev
    ServerAlias http://happylager.dev
</VirtualHost>

Content of .htaccess files:

The .htaccess file in the public folder contains:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    # Send would-be 404 requests to Craft
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(favicon\.ico|apple-touch-icon.*\.png)$ [NC]
    RewriteRule (.+) index.php?p=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

The .htaccess file in the craft folder contains:

deny from all

XAMPP versioning information:

• PHP Version 7.04
• phpMyAdmin version 4.5.1

This error occured during step 7 and 8 on this page:

https://github.com/pixelandtonic/HappyLager

Rebooted as well just in case. When I try to resolve 'happylager.dev' or 'http://happylager.dev' the error still persists. The virtual hosts resolve other names without error. Any idea what I might not be considering? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The issue here is actually the use of the TLD .dev. Google now owns that extension and in Chrome (which later, other browsers including Safari and Firefox enforced) it now forces the URL to go over SSL. If you don’t want to deal with all that self-signed certificate stuff to get SSL working locally, your best bet is to just switch the extension to something like .test and it should work just fine.