An annoying error

I've been working on Lawcce for a few days and because I want to have a workflow closer to production for local development, both my NextJS instance and Backend code use https, as such I've encountered a small but annoying error:

⨯ Error: self-signed certificate
  [...]
  code: 'DEPTH_ZERO_SELF_SIGNED_CERT'
  [...]

The solution

Depending on your needs you have multiple solutions:

Use https with NextJS

As pointed out by Kyle on this StackOverflow thread, you can force NextJS (available since version 15 iirc) pass the flag --experimental-https as such: next dev --experimental-https an easy way to do that if you don't want to modify your package.json is to do: npx next dev --experimental-https.

You'll then be able to connect to your NextJS local server using https!

Accept self-signed certificate on the backend

If your NextJS backend is communicating with another backend over https locally, you might encounter the error described above, it's actually related to the inner working of NodeJS, you can suppress using this warning as described here.

• On windows (powershell):

$ $env:NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0
$ <your nextjs command>

This parameter will be active for your current powershell session even after stopping NextJS

• On Linux

NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0 <your nextjs command>

This parameter should only be active for this NextJS session (correct me if I'm wrong).

Disclaimer

This is only intended for debug/local environments, do not use it in production! If you are developing on a VPS (or cloud server) make sure to disable it in production and not run it on ports that are exposed to untrusted clients.