First run

The first time you start nearhost, the main panel shows a one-screen setup instead of the usual views. It explains the two prompts you are about to see, runs nearhost trust, then lands on Home.

What the setup screen does

1. Explains the trust prompt and the sudo prompt before either appears.
2. Creates the internal certificate authority, named “Nearhost Local CA”, under ~/.config/nearhost/caddy.
3. Runs nearhost trust to install the authority’s root certificate.
4. Opens Home.

You can run the trust step yourself at any time:

nearhost trust

The trust prompt

nearhost trust installs the root certificate into your system trust store. This is what lets your browser accept https://<alias> without a warning. On macOS that is the System keychain, and on Linux it is your distribution’s certificate store. Both ask for your password once.

Firefox, and Chromium-based browsers on Linux, keep their own stores. Nearhost updates those too when certutil is installed, and tells you when it could not. See Install for the one-line setup.

If you decline, the proxy still runs. Home shows the certificate authority as untrusted, with the nearhost trust hint. nearhost untrust reverses the change.

The sudo prompt

Nearhost edits /etc/hosts to resolve .test aliases. It does this with one sudo call per change, and only when the aliases it owns change. See The hosts file.

Home

Home shows:

• proxy state
• ports 80 and 443
• CA trust status
• hosts block status
• the config path
• the number of running projects

Below that is the combined log with a filter line. Press h or esc from anywhere to return to it.

Next: Add a server or, for a project on this machine, Add a project.