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
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
- Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
- In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
- Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
- What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
- We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- workflows for ai coding from /* 🤖🛠️ */
- Reinvent the Wheel from Matthias Endler
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
in the heat of the summer better call out a plumber
Back in the old days, the good old days, when it was generally accepted that Fascism and Nazis were bad, bloggers would write these posts that were sort of recaps […]
via WIL WHEATON dot NET June 20, 2025Just one more Patreon indignity
I was today years old when I learned that Patreon offers no mechanism to download all of your own posts from your "creator" account. Because fuck you that's why. Confirmed with "support" [sic] who sent me a response with the level of ov…
via jwz June 20, 2025Pluralistic: Oregon bans the corporate practice of medicine (20 Jun 2025)
Today's links Oregon bans the corporate practice of medicine: Karma for Unitedhealthcare, Part II. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2015, 2020 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. …
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow June 20, 2025Generated by openring