Alpine Linux, wget, and ca-certificates
I’ve been working with Alpine Linux this week. This tiny Linux distribution is an excellent choice for a base docker image or, in my case, for a low power VPS. I love how easy and fast it is to install and configure this distribution.
One stumbling block that I ran into was downloading random things from the internet with wget.
Unable to locally verify the issuer's authority.
To connect to dl.eff.org insecurely, use `--no-check-certificate'
I saw this timely tweet by Joe Gross the other day and decided that rather than ignoring the error messages that wget was throwing I would go and figure out what was wrong.
It turns out that when you make an 83MB distribution you need to cut some of the fat. The ca-certificates package that is common in every Linux Distribution under the sun is missing from the default installation of Alpine.
In order to resolve the angry warnings from wget, you can install the ca-certificates package with the following command:
apk -U add ca-certificates
This will make wget happy, and your server secure. In case you are wondering, skipping this step and running wget with –no-check-certificate totally works. However, it is also inviting a man in the middle attack. Don’t ever do this.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- Great Lakes, Illinois
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- Are we inside a Sarlacc?
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- Microblog
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
- [RIDGELINE] No Phones in The Ten-don Shop from Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
- My next chapter with Mastodon from Mastodon Blog
- How many pillars of observability can you fit on the head of a pin? from charity.wtf
- The Software Essays that Shaped Me from Refactoring English
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Pluralistic: Happy Public Domain Day 2026! (17 Dec 2025)
Today's links Happy Public Domain Day 2026! The best way to cut through the hellishly complex thicket and bring our culture back to life. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Weird D&D advice; Email sabbaticals. Upcoming app…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow December 17, 2025Yearn Finance suffers fourth exploit only weeks after third
Only weeks after losing $6.6 million to an infinite mint exploit, a Yearn Finance smart contract has again been exploited, allowing an attacker to make off with around 103 ETH (~$300,000). The affected contract is a legacy contract t…
via Web3 is Going Just Great December 17, 2025What Actually Is Claude Code’s Plan Mode?
I’ve mentioned this a few times now, but when I started using Claude it was because Peter got me hooked on it. From the very beginning I became a religious user of what is colloquially called YOLO mode, which basically gives the agent all the permissions so…
via Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings December 17, 2025Generated by openring