Vanish

Fast and simple tool to generate development certificates locally, built in Rust.

Vanish follows the X.509 Standards as mentioned in RFC 3280 ( April 2002 ) to match the PKI Standards.

Vanish also follow the XDG Base Direcctory Specification to store the CA Keys.

// To generate certificates
$ vanish generate -d localhost -d www.vedanalytics.in

// to generate certificate requests
$ vanish generate -d localhost --req-only

About

Generating certificates locally might be the best option rather that generating it from a registered Authority as you have the control of your private key.

Vanish's CLI built in Rust allows you to generate trusted certificates for your domains which you can use for any domain ( even localhost !! ). Apart from that, many measures have been taken, keeping performance in mind. Vanish -

• Is Cross-platform (macOS, Windows, Linux)
• is a Single binary, hence easy installation
• Built with speed in mind
• Small Binary Size ( Less than 4 MBs on Debian )

Installation

Currently Vanish is just distributed through Cargo but we are working full time to support distribution from other package managers.

Cargo

cargo install vanish

Build From Source

# Install Rust
git clone https://github.com/shubhexists/vanish
cd vanish
cargo build --release

Work In Progress

Although Vanish is now functional, it is to be considered that it is still a new project and hence many planned features are yet to be implemented. Vanish has implemented -

• - Generate Certificate Requests
• - Generate Certificates and Keys for multiple Domains
• - Add Trust Store Support for multiple Platforms
• - Add more encoding Formats ( Currently, only .pem is supported.)
• - Add Support for multiple CA's in the Root Store
• - Add S/MIME support for emails
• - Modify Key Size ( Currently it is 2048 bytes ). See, []

These are just the planned ones, It may have many other features. If you have one, file it in the issues !

Paramenters

The Vanish CLI has many parameters to help you generate certificates without much hassle!

Note - Order of these commands don't matter. So, you can place them in any order.

Let's have a look at them -

1. -d or --domain to add a domain to the list

vanish generate -d vedanalytics.in -d localhost

2. --no-ca to force Vanish to use the default CA in the Data Directory. If it could not find a certificate, it will return a error :D

vanish generate -d vedanalytics.in -d localhost --no-ca

3. --req-only to generate a "Certificate Request" rather than a Certificate. You can use this Request to further generate a Certificate.

vanish generate -d vedanalytics.in -d localhost --req-only

4. --keyfile and --certfile to provide your own CA certificates. Vanish would then use these certificates to generate your Ceertificate!

   Note: You need to provide both --keyfile and --certfile. If you provide just one, Vanish will prompt you a error!

vanish generate -d vedanalytics.in -d localhost --keyfile ./ca-key.pem --certfile ./ca.pem

5. --csr to generate certificates from a "Certificate Request" file

   Note - --csr flag conflicts with the --req-only flag as you can not generate Requests from a Request right? : D

vanish generate --csr ./csr.pem

6. -o or --output to specify a output directory.

   Note: The value of -o Argument should be a directory and not a file. Vanish automatically generates the filename to store in the specified directory If you don't specify a directory, the default directories will be the Current Working Directory.

vanish generate --csr ./csr.pem -o ./certificates/

7. -c for Country, -cn for Common Name, -s for State. However option, it is a good practice to include these things in your certificate.

vanish generate -d vedanalytics.in -d localhost --no-ca -c India -s Delhi

NOTE

Thank's for reading. Do drop a star ✨ as it helps to spread the words :D