Git SSL Errors

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Depending on the type of corporate network your machine is on, they may do some funky things to SSL certificates. For example, completely breaking them and replacing them with a different one. Here’s some example errors that a colleague of mine was having:

$ git submodule update
 Initialized empty Git repository in /home/user/.vim/bundle/NERDTree/.git/
 error: SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details:
 error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed while accessing https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree.git/info/refs

To ignore such certificate errors, you can issue the following command to prevent git from verifying SSL certificates:

git config --global http.sslVerify false

Keep in mind though that this is technically a security risk, and you should not run this command on your personal computers outside of this firewalled network. If you move your machine between various networks, this should be re-enabled when on a normal network.

Tags: #git #ssl
Thomas Hunter II Avatar

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.