Error: UNABLE_TO_VERIFY_LEAF_SIGNATURE Phonegap Installation

Question

I'm trying to install Phonegap in Ubuntu. The installation of NodeJS was successful, however I can't install Phonegap itself. Here is the error output of terminal:

test@test-VirtualBox:~$ sudo npm install -g phonegap
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/phonegap
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/phonegap
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/phonegap
npm ERR! Error: UNABLE_TO_VERIFY_LEAF_SIGNATURE
npm ERR!     at SecurePair.<anonymous> (tls.js:1350:32)
npm ERR!     at SecurePair.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:92:17)
npm ERR!     at SecurePair.maybeInitFinished (tls.js:963:10)
npm ERR!     at CleartextStream.read [as _read] (tls.js:463:15)
npm ERR!     at CleartextStream.Readable.read (_stream_readable.js:320:10)
npm ERR!     at EncryptedStream.write [as _write] (tls.js:366:25)
npm ERR!     at doWrite (_stream_writable.js:219:10)
npm ERR!     at writeOrBuffer (_stream_writable.js:209:5)
npm ERR!     at EncryptedStream.Writable.write (_stream_writable.js:180:11)
npm ERR!     at write (_stream_readable.js:573:24)
npm ERR! If you need help, you may report this log at:
npm ERR!     <http://bugs.debian.org/npm>
npm ERR! or use
npm ERR!     reportbug --attach /home/test/npm-debug.log npm

npm ERR! System Linux 3.11.0-14-generic
npm ERR! command "/usr/bin/nodejs" "/usr/bin/npm" "install" "-g" "phonegap"
npm ERR! cwd /home/test
npm ERR! node -v v0.10.15
npm ERR! npm -v 1.2.18
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Additional logging details can be found in:
npm ERR!     /home/test/npm-debug.log
npm ERR! not ok code 0

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I got the same error, given I was behind a corporate firewall/proxy and my connection was passed the proxy's certificate.

In your command line run:

npm config set strict-ssl false

NOTE: that this is not best practice to blindly accept untrusted or invalid SSL certificates, which is what the command does (turn off certificate checking). You can run

npm config set strict-ssl true

to turn it back on.

ref: https://thomashunter.name/blog/npm-ssl-errors/

Answer 2

This can be fixed without disabling strict SSL, however it is non-trivial.

Find the certificates actually being used, likely you're behind a corporate SSL intercepting proxy. You might be able to use a browser, some CLI tool etc. I ended up running certmgr.msc in Windows as the certificates are distributed via Group policy and export as p7b files.

Convert the certificates if necessary, I used openssl tool to convert from p7b to PEM (aka .crt)

openssl pkcs7 -print_certs -inform DER -in /mnt/adam/certs/my-company-root.p7b -outform PEM -out my-company-root.crt

Merge, if there is more than one certificate, into a single PEM file, taking care to order from leaf to root.

cat my-company-leaf.crt my-company-intermediate.crt my-company-root.crt > my-company-single.crt

Configure npm at the certificate file

npm config set cafile my-company-single.crt

(or globally)

sudo npm config set -g cafile my-company-single.crt

Answer 3

running

npm config set strict-ssl false

solved my problem.

I'm using Vagrant (Linux precise32 Ubuntu ), and Windows 7 as host.

Thanks