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SSL issue with Rubygems
Oct 05, 2016

I decided to update my working computer, in the morning today, wrong decision. After doing it I started getting the following errors after executing bundle install:

Fetching source index from https://rubygems.org/
Retrying fetcher due to error (2/4): Bundler::Fetcher::CertificateFailureError Could not verify the SSL certificate for https://rubygems.org/.
There is a chance you are experiencing a man-in-the-middle attack, but most likely your system doesn't have the CA certificates needed for verification. For information about OpenSSL certificates, see http://bit.ly/ruby-ssl. To connect without using SSL, edit your Gemfile sources and change 'https' to 'http'.
Retrying fetcher due to error (3/4): Bundler::Fetcher::CertificateFailureError Could not verify the SSL certificate for https://rubygems.org/.
There is a chance you are experiencing a man-in-the-middle attack, but most likely your system doesn't have the CA certificates needed for verification. For information about OpenSSL certificates, see http://bit.ly/ruby-ssl. To connect without using SSL, edit your Gemfile sources and change 'https' to 'http'.
Retrying fetcher due to error (4/4): Bundler::Fetcher::CertificateFailureError Could not verify the SSL certificate for https://rubygems.org/.
There is a chance you are experiencing a man-in-the-middle attack, but most likely your system doesn't have the CA certificates needed for verification. For information about OpenSSL certificates, see http://bit.ly/ruby-ssl. To connect without using SSL, edit your Gemfile sources and change 'https' to 'http'.
Could not verify the SSL certificate for https://rubygems.org/.
There is a chance you are experiencing a man-in-the-middle attack, but most likely your system doesn't have the CA
certificates needed for verification. For information about OpenSSL certificates, see http://bit.ly/ruby-ssl. To
connect without using SSL, edit your Gemfile sources and change 'https' to 'http'.

Obviously this implied that everything related to rubygem was not working because gem install bundler was also throwing:

ERROR:  Could not find a valid gem 'bundler' (>= 0), here is why:
Unable to download data from https://rubygems.org/ - SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=error: certificate verify failed (https://api.rubygems.org/specs.4.8.gz)

The SSL certificates on my work computer where obviously busted and because remote environments worked fine there was no blaming Rubygems this time. Google helped me find some possible answers:

  1. Replace https with http
  2. Manually download the certificate and apply it
  3. Use rvm osx-ssl-certs update all

I didn’t even consider trying the first suggestion, obvious reasons; the second and third option did not work, so before going all nuclear I decided to try one last thing:

brew install openssl

And that fixed the whole thing! It only took me about 40 minutes to fix, what a waste of time. Fixing this issue retaught me two things:

  1. Do you have something important to do today? Do not think about updating your computer.
  2. Dockerize all your world, at least the problems will be reduced to something in the container, not your computer; most of the times.

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