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

Occupation and Preoccupation

Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview: What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation. I’d never really noticed the connection between th…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog July 17, 2025

What do we do when the facts don't matter?

As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous resear…

via The Torment Nexus July 17, 2025

Back to the Future

This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards co…

via flower.codes July 17, 2025

Generated by openring