Insomnia and NodeJS: "Error: Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with given CA certificates"

Question

I'm trying to send a GET request using the Insomnia app to a NodeJS server app -- I didn't write the app but have joined the team.

Although I get a reasonable JSON response when I hit the URL -- https://127.0.0.1:9999 -- from the browser, I get the error "Error: Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with given CA certificates" when I'm using Insomnia. Using a Mac, MacOS 10.12.4. Node v6.3.1.

The Insomnia timeline says:

* Preparing request to https://127.0.0.1:9999/
* Enable automatic URL encoding
* Enable SSL validation
* Enable cookie sending with jar of 2 cookies
* Hostname in DNS cache was stale, zapped
*   Trying 127.0.0.1...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) port 9999 (#8)
* WARNING: using IP address, SNI is being disabled by the OS.
* SSL certificate problem: Invalid certificate chain
* Curl_http_done: called premature == 1
* Closing connection 8

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

There is little documentation on how Insomnia handles certificates. As long as they are normal certificates that are signed by a typical CA authority there is typically no problem. Since you also refer to your loopback address (127.0.0.1) I assume that you're also testing with a self-signed certificate.

I noticed that Insomnia uses the Mozilla list of certificate authorities. It does not use the list of your operating system.

The list is stored in a text-file in a directory like C:\Temp\insomnia_5.12.4. In my case it was for example 2017-01-18.pem. You can add your own signing authority certificate to this file.

I didn't look into how stable this file is or how it is created.

You can also workaround the certificate errors by disabling them in your settings (settings > Validate SSL Certificates).