Problem: wanted to serve some assets over https using SimpleHTTPServer. Solution: used info from here and here following snippet combines both of those links: import BaseHTTPServer, SimpleHTTPServer import ssl httpd = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(('localhost', 8090), SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler) httpd.socket = ssl.wrap_socket (httpd.socket, certfile='~/ssl/server.crt', keyfile='~/ssl/server.key', server_side=True) httpd.serve_forever()