Requests library: missing SSL handshake certificates file after cx_Freeze

Question

I'm building an application in python 3.3 which uses the requests library. When I try to get a URL with SSL connection I want to verify it with verify = true. This works perfectly when running my python scripts.

When I freeze the same scripts it crashes. It misses something and I really cant figure out how to integrate it in my frozen application.

I get the following error (which also triggers other errors, but I don't post them here):

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Python33-32\lib\site-packages\requests\packages\urllib3\connectionpool.py", line 422, in urlopen
body=body, headers=headers)
File "C:\Python33-32\lib\site-packages\requests\packages\urllib3\connectionpool.py", line 274, in _make_request
conn.request(method, url, **httplib_request_kw)
File "C:\Python33-32\lib\http\client.py", line 1049, in request
self._send_request(method, url, body, headers)
File "C:\Python33-32\lib\http\client.py", line 1087, in _send_request
self.endheaders(body)
File "C:\Python33-32\lib\http\client.py", line 1045, in endheaders
self._send_output(message_body)
File "C:\Python33-32\lib\http\client.py", line 890, in _send_output
self.send(msg)
File "C:\Python33-32\lib\http\client.py", line 828, in send
self.connect()
File "C:\Python33-32\lib\site-packages\requests\packages\urllib3\connectionpool.py", line 105, in connect
ssl_version=self.ssl_version)
File "C:\Python33-32\lib\site-packages\requests\packages\urllib3\util.py", line 281, in ssl_wrap_socket
context.load_verify_locations(ca_certs)
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory 

It seems that ca_certs is missing. There is a file called cacert.pem in the requests library, but I don't know if this is the missing file and how to import it since it seems to be not integrated into my final frozen package.

Answer 1

Looking at the requests source, it seems you can pass the path to the cacert.pem file as verify=path, instead of verify=True. So you don't need to modify requests for it to work.

You can pass the path of a file to include in the include-files parameter of the cx_Freeze options (docs). You can find the path from requests, so something like this should work in the setup.py you use to freeze it:

import requests.certs
build_exe_options = {"include_files":[(requests.certs.where(),'cacert.pem')]}

#...

Answer 2

As Thomas K said, you need to include a CA certificates file if you enable verification.

However, I found that at least for me, requests will look for [INSTALL PATH]\library.zip\cacert.pem which will fail.

I solved it by copying the cacert.pem as described

import requests.certs
build_exe_options = {"include_files":[(requests.certs.where(),'cacert.pem')]}

#...

and specified its path directly when performing a request:

requests.get(..., verify = '[INSTALL PATH]\cacert.pem')