Weeknotes 15

After last week’s lack of Content comes slightly more Content.

I spent some time diagnosing an SSL issue this week. Occasionally some Ruby code was throwing OpenSSL::SSL:SSLError exceptions.

OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=error: certificate verify failed (unable to get local issuer certificate)

It seems OpenSSL, and as a consequence Ruby, could not connect to a URL because it can’t verify the SSL certificate. It doesn’t happen on every https URL, but happens enough to warrant an investigation.

I found a couple of useful scripts whilst Googling around for ideas. The first was a script put together by the Bundler team. This was really useful to get a broad idea of what might be going wrong.

The second was by Mislav Marohnić dated back in 2013 - some problems don’t go away - and he also had written an accompanying blog post explaining the issues.

The solution seems to be that we need to update our root SSL certificates. I haven’t done that yet, but hopefully it solves the issue 🤞