Question

Given an SSL key and certificate, how does one create an HTTPS service?

Answer 1

For Node 0.3.4 and above all the way up to the current LTS (v21 at the time of this edit), https://nodejs.org/api/https.html#httpscreateserveroptions-requestlistener has all the example code you need:

const https = require('node:https');
const fs = require('node:fs');

const options = {
  key: fs.readFileSync('test/fixtures/keys/agent2-key.pem'),
  cert: fs.readFileSync('test/fixtures/keys/agent2-cert.pem'),
};

https.createServer(options, (req, res) => {
  res.writeHead(200);
  res.end('hello world\n');
}).listen(8000); 

Note that if want to use Let’s Encrypt’s certificates using the certbot tool, the private key is called privkey.pem and the certificate is called fullchain.pem:

const certDir = `/etc/letsencrypt/live`;
const domain = `YourDomainName`;
const options = {
  key: fs.readFileSync(`${certDir}/${domain}/privkey.pem`),
  cert: fs.readFileSync(`${certDir}/${domain}/fullchain.pem`)
};