[node.js] npm install error - unable to get local issuer certificate

I am getting an unable to get local issuer certificate error when performing an npm install:

typings ERR! message Unable to read typings for "es6-shim". You should check the
 entry paths in "es6-shim.d.ts" are up to date
typings ERR! caused by Unable to connect to "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/D
efinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/7de6c3dd94feaeb21f20054b9f30d5dabc5efabd/es6-shim
/es6-shim.d.ts"
typings ERR! caused by unable to get local issuer certificate

I have recently update to node 4 from a much earlier version and it sounds like node is much more strict when these kind of problems arise.

There is an issue discussed here which talks about using ca files, but it's a bit beyond my understanding and I'm unsure what to do about it.

I am behind a corporate firewall, but I can get to the url fine in a browser without any restriction.

Does anyone have any further insight into this issue and what possible solutions there are?

I'm wondering about reverting to node 0.12 in the meantime :(

My problem was that my company proxy was getting in the way. The solution here was to identify the Root CA / certificate chain of our proxy, (on mac) export it from the keychain in .pem format, then export a variable for node to use.

export NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS=/path/to/your/CA/cert.pem

Use the command

npm config set strict-ssl false

A disclaimer: This solution is less secure, bad practice, don't do this. I had a duplicate error message--I'm behind a corporate VPN/firewall. I was able to resolve this issue by adding a .typingsrc file to my user directory (C:\Users\MyUserName\.typingsrc in windows). Of course, anytime you're circumventing SSL you should be yapping to your sys admins to fix the certificate issue.

Change the registry URL from https to http, and as seen in nfiles' answser above, set rejectUnauthorized to false.

.typingsrc (placed in project directory or in user root directory)

{
     "rejectUnauthorized": false,
     "registryURL": "http://api.typings.org/"
}

Optionally add your github token (I didn't find success until I had added this too.)

{
    "rejectUnauthorized": false,
    "registryURL": "http://api.typings.org/",
    "githubToken": "YourGitHubToken"
}

See instructions for setting up your github token at https://github.com/blog/1509-personal-api-tokens

In case you use yarn:

yarn config set strict-ssl false

This worked for me:

export NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0

Try

npm config set strict-ssl false

This is a alternative shared in this url https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/3742

I have encountered the same issue. This command didn't work for me either:

npm config set strict-ssl false

After digging deeper, I found out that this link was block by our IT admin.

http://registry.npmjs.org/npm

So if you are facing the same issue, make sure this link is accessible to your browser first.

Well this is not a right answer but can be consider as a quick workaround. Right answer is turn off Strict SSL.

I am having the same error

PhantomJS not found on PATH
Downloading https://github.com/Medium/phantomjs/releases/download/v2.1.1/phantomjs-2.1.1-windows.zip
Saving to C:\Users\Sam\AppData\Local\Temp\phantomjs\phantomjs-2.1.1-windows.zip
Receiving...

Error making request.
Error: unable to get local issuer certificate
at TLSSocket. (_tls_wrap.js:1105:38)
at emitNone (events.js:106:13)
at TLSSocket.emit (events.js:208:7)
at TLSSocket._finishInit (_tls_wrap.js:639:8)
at TLSWrap.ssl.onhandshakedone (_tls_wrap.js:469:38)

So the after reading the error.

Just downloaded the file manually and placed it on the required path. i.e

C:\Users\Sam\AppData\Local\Temp\phantomjs\

This solved my problem.

    PhantomJS not found on PATH                                                                                                
Download already available at C:\Users\sam\AppData\Local\Temp\phantomjs\phantomjs-2.1.1-windows.zip                    
Verified checksum of previously downloaded file                                                                            
Extracting zip contents                                    

There is an issue discussed here which talks about using ca files, but it's a bit beyond my understanding and I'm unsure what to do about it.

This isn't too difficult once you know how! For Windows:

Using Chrome go to the root URL NPM is complaining about (so https://raw.githubusercontent.com in your case). Open up dev tools and go to Security-> View Certificate. Check Certification path and make sure your at the top level certificate, if not open that one. Now go to "Details" and export the cert with "Copy to File...".

You need to convert this from DER to PEM. There are several ways to do this, but the easiest way I found was an online tool which should be easy to find with relevant keywords.

Now if you open the key with your favorite text editor you should see

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- 

yourkey

-----END CERTIFICATE-----

This is the format you need. You can do this for as many keys as you need, and combine them all into one file. I had to do github and the npm registry keys in my case.

Now just edit your .npmrc to point to the file containing your keys like so

cafile=C:\workspace\rootCerts.crt

I have personally found this to perform significantly better behind our corporate proxy as opposed to the strict-ssl option. YMMV.

Anyone gets this error when 'npm install' is trying to fetch a package from HTTPS server with a self-signed or invalid certificate.

Quick and insecure solution:

npm config set strict-ssl false

Why this solution is insecure? The above command tells npm to connect and fetch module from server even server do not have valid certificate and server identity is not verified. So if there is a proxy server between npm client and actual server, it provided man in middle attack opportunity to an intruder.

Secure solution:

If any module in your package.json is hosted on a server with self-signed CA certificate then npm is unable to identify that server with an available system CA certificates. So you need to provide CA certificate for server validation with the explicit configuration in .npmrc. In .npmrc you need to provide cafile, please refer more detail about cafile configuration here

cafile=./ca-certs.pem

In ca-certs file, you can add any number of CA certificates(public) that you required to identify servers. The certificate should be in “Base-64 encoded X.509 (.CER)(PEM)” format.

For example,

# cat ca-certs.pem 
DigiCert Global Root CA
=======================
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
CAUw7C29C79Fv1C5qfPrmAE.....
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

VeriSign Class 3 Public Primary Certification Authority - G5
========================================
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIE0zCCA7ugAwIBAgIQ......
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Note: once you provide cafile configuration in .npmrc, npm try to identify all server using CA certificate(s) provided in cafile only, it won't check system CA certificate bundles then. If someone wants all well-known public CA authority certificat bundle then can get from here.

One other situation when you get this error:

If you have mentioned Git URL as a dependency in package.json and git is on invalid/self-signed certificate then also npm throws a similar error. You can fix it with following configuration for git client

git config --global http.sslVerify false 

Add:

process.env["NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED"]

Source: Ignore invalid self-signed ssl certificate in node.js with https.request?