Alpine Linux, wget, and ca-certificates

| linux | devops |

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

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Tradeoffs to Continuous Software?

I came across this post from the tech collective crftd. about how software is in a process of “continuous disintegration”: One of the uncomfortable truths we sometimes have to break to people is that software isn't just never “done”. Worse even, it rot…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog May 28, 2025

Pluralistic: America is a scam (28 May 2025)

Today's links America is a scam: Welcome to the age of cheating. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readi…

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow May 28, 2025

How I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old

Tripling reading level through tutoring

via The Intrinsic Perspective May 28, 2025

Generated by openring