Git SSL Errors

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.

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.