IIS Express trust self-signed SSL certificate with CLI

Question

We're developing Web API web servers in Visual Studio. We have enabled SSL. This requires a local SSL certificate. We have set this up on our development machines, but we need to be able to set it up on our CI build machines via command line in order to run Selenium tests. Locally, Visual Studio is helpful with getting this taken care of. When you start the Web API web servers, you get the following prompt:

This project is configured to use SSL. To avoid SSL warnings in the browser you can choose to trust the self-signed certificate that IIS Express has generated.

Would you like to trust the IIS Express SSL certificate?

I need to duplicate what happens when I click "Yes" in this prompt via the command line. How do I do this?

Answer 1

The following C# code does exactly what Visual Studio does, (taken from Jexus Manager, https://github.com/jexuswebserver/JexusManager/blob/master/JexusManager.Features.Certificates/CertificatesFeature.cs)

        private void Trust()
        {
            var cert = SelectedItem.Certificate;
            var store = new X509Store(StoreName.Root, StoreLocation.CurrentUser);
            store.Open(OpenFlags.ReadWrite);
            if (store.Certificates.Find(X509FindType.FindByThumbprint, cert.Thumbprint, false).Count == 0)
            {
                try
                {
                    store.Add(cert);
                }
                catch (CryptographicException ex)
                {
                    if (ex.HResult != NativeMethods.UserCancelled)
                    {
                        var dialog = (IManagementUIService)GetService(typeof(IManagementUIService));
                        dialog.ShowMessage($"An unexpected error happened. HResult is {ex.HResult}. Contact your system administrator.", Name,
                            MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error);
                    }

                    // add operation cancelled.
                }
            }

            store.Close();
        }

Translate it to PowerShell or any equivalent command and then you can achieve your goal.