square/certstrap

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2452 stars · 212 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

certstrap is a Go-based CLI tool for bootstrapping your own certificate authorities and managing a simple public key infrastructure. It initializes CAs, generates certificate signing requests and keypairs, and signs certificates without needing OpenSSL config files.

Use cases

• create a local certificate authority for development
• generate self-signed TLS certificates for internal services
• sign certificate signing requests without openssl
• bootstrap a small PKI for mutual TLS
• issue client certificates for service authentication

When to choose

• you want simple CA/certificate creation without OpenSSL's complexity
• you need to bootstrap a private PKI quickly
• you prefer a single static Go binary over OpenSSL config files

When to avoid

• you need a full-featured PKI with revocation infrastructure at scale
• you require advanced X.509 extensions or complex certificate policies
• you already have an established CA workflow with OpenSSL or a commercial CA

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

cryptography security cli security developer-tools windows go cli cross-platform certificate-authority tls x509 csr pki openssl-alternative command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="square/certstrap")