Posted by argiepiano on Sat, Oct 02, 2021 - 9:51am

Hello. My development localhost installation of Backdrop CMS is suddenly failing to check for updates. The same site correctly checks for updates in the production server.

I'm using MAMP's Apache to serve localhost. The issue seems to be the call to:

stream_socket_client('ssl://updates.backdropcms.org:443')

to initiate a socket connection, within the function backdrop_http_request in common.inc.  This call returns the following warning:

Warning: stream_socket_client(): SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages: error:14090086:SSL routines:ssl3_get_server_certificate:certificate verify failed

And subsequently, backdrop_http_request returns a "Error opening socket ssl://updates.backdropcms.org:443" error.

The problem seems to be an error verifying a certificate (probably in my local environment?), but I don't know enough about certificates and MAMP to fix this issue. The strange thing is that Backdrop was checking updates just fine a few weeks ago. 

Any clue or help will be really appreciated. Thanks!

Accepted answer

I was FINALLY able to fix this issue! Typing the answer in hopes that it will help others.

The cacert.pem file provided by MAMP apparently was expired. I downloaded a new cacert.pem file from Mozilla and placed it inside the folder /Applications/MAMP/Library/OpenSSL/certs

That solved the issue! 

Comments

Sun, Oct 03, 2021 - 8:22am by argiepiano

Thanks for taking the time for forward this, but this did not solve the issue. To clarify, I am able to use MAMP to serve secure pages (this is possible to do with the current version of MAMP without the need to follow the steps you forwarded - MAMP itself creates the ssl certificates). Still, the warnings persist, and the connection fail when checking for Backdrop updates. This is really puzzling and to be honest is driving me crazy, as this was working in the past.   

Sun, Oct 03, 2021 - 9:03am by argiepiano

I was FINALLY able to fix this issue! Typing the answer in hopes that it will help others.

The cacert.pem file provided by MAMP apparently was expired. I downloaded a new cacert.pem file from Mozilla and placed it inside the folder /Applications/MAMP/Library/OpenSSL/certs

That solved the issue! 

Olafski's picture

Sun, Oct 03, 2021 - 9:22am by Olafski

Today I have noticed the same issue on some sites which are all at the same hosting provider. Other sites are getting update data without any problem. So far, I don't have any idea why this is happening. I guess there's something wrong with the Backdrop server but it seems only to be an issue under certain circumstances.

Olafski's picture

Tue, Oct 05, 2021 - 12:38am by Olafski

Update data connections on my sites work again. I guess it was a temporary problem of the hosting provider.