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.
- Future Fonts from Blog – Brad Frost
- 21st Century C++ from Communications of the ACM
- Submarines DevCon 2025 Keynote Speech from JoshHaines.com
- How I Use AI: Meet My Promptly Hired Model Intern from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- DeepSeek from Maggie Appleton
- Digital Reality Digital Shock from Christopher Butler
- 10 habits to help becoming a Debian Maintainer from Optimized by Otto
- Tiny corners from Manuel Moreale RSS Feed
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Notes from Alexander Petros’ “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”
I loved this talk from Alexander Petros titled “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”. What follows is summation of my note-taking from watching the talk on YouTube. Is what you’re building for future generations: Useful for them? Maintainable by them? Adapt…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog May 14, 2025Open Up, Episode 2: Fundamentals, Principles, Navigating an Imperfect World, Collaboration, and Old Friends
I’m late in posting this because boy oh boy, there’s been a lot going on. But Episode 2 of our show Open Up is out! Geoff and I tackled some great questions and covered a lot of ground in this […]
via Blog – Brad Frost May 14, 2025Your license is a scam
Good morning. Good morning sir! How can I help you? Hello, hi. I was interested in buying one of your cars, the Model A. I really like it and it seems perfect for me. That’s an excellent choice! Model A is a great car, the price starts at 20 …
via Manuel Moreale May 14, 2025Generated by openring