How To Automatically Skip Wget SSL Certificate Check

A lot of servers use self signed and cheap SLL certificates. That’s why downloading stuff with wget, you might get this quite a lot:

wget https://www.superencrypted.com/server/isnot.tar.gz

–2014-01-01 01:01:01– https://www.superencrypted.com/server/isnot.tar.gz
Resolving superencrypted.com (superencrypted.com)… 255.255.255.255, 255.255.255.255
Connecting to superencrypted.com (superencrypted.com)|255.255.255.255|:443… connected.
ERROR: The certificate of `superencrypted.com’ is not trusted.
ERROR: The certificate of `superencrypted.com’ hasn’t got a known issuer.

In an ideal world, you would use a separate option to get passed this, only if you have good reason to trust the host. Which is as simple as:

wget –no-check-certificate https://www.superencrypted.com/server/isnot.tar.gz

However, that is 22 characters you have to type, every time to do that.

In most cases, you have no option but to pass a security exemption if you really need the file! Thus this has become annoying enough that I have made it permanent.

Automatically skipping the wget SSL certification check, when I’m downloading pretty much anything from anywhere.

Open text editor and point it to users home directory and a file called “.wgetrc”.

For example:

pico $HOME/.wgetrc

and add the line:

check_certificate = off

If you want to tweak some more, here are all the possible commands you can add to the wget configuration startup file.

Thanks for reading and comments welcome! David.