Starting a few weeks ago, the installation of Backdrop I have on multiple different machines (all running MacOS Server) has stopped being able to retrieve updates.

The log error I get is:

HTTP request to https://updates.backdropcms.org/release-history/backup_migrate/1.x?site_... failed with error: Error opening socket ssl://updates.backdropcms.org:443.

Navigating to the selected URL shows me a 404 error from NGINX.

Searching for this on the forum shows up errors relating to expired/invalid certificates in MAMP, or errors opening SSL connections in PHP 5.6. In this case, though, I'm not using MAMP, and I'm on PHP  7.1.33.

I manually updated to 1.20.2 and the problem persists.

Anyone have any ideas?

Accepted answer

I think you must have found an issue I posted here in October with exactly the same problem and sam error. I'm really not a specialist on SSL and certificates, and I have never worked with MacOS servers, but I was able to fix that issue by downloading a new cacert.pem certificate from Mozilla and putting it in the right place so that my server could find it when sending the SSL request to get the updates. That has solved the issue. See  the post I created and the solution I posted.

In my really rudimentary/basic understanding of this, I believe this issue stems from the fact that your Backdrop page makes a secure call to ssl://updates.backdropcms.org:443 to get the list of updates. To make this connection it has to send a valid certificate.

If I were you, I would look around in your server for a cacert.pem, and I would try to replace the one there with a new one downloaded from Mozilla (see link above). Save the old file just in case.

Comments

I think you must have found an issue I posted here in October with exactly the same problem and sam error. I'm really not a specialist on SSL and certificates, and I have never worked with MacOS servers, but I was able to fix that issue by downloading a new cacert.pem certificate from Mozilla and putting it in the right place so that my server could find it when sending the SSL request to get the updates. That has solved the issue. See  the post I created and the solution I posted.

In my really rudimentary/basic understanding of this, I believe this issue stems from the fact that your Backdrop page makes a secure call to ssl://updates.backdropcms.org:443 to get the list of updates. To make this connection it has to send a valid certificate.

If I were you, I would look around in your server for a cacert.pem, and I would try to replace the one there with a new one downloaded from Mozilla (see link above). Save the old file just in case.

Thanks, I think I managed to fix it.

It looks like on MacOS Server, Backdrop and Drupal use curl to retrieve updates, and curl on MacOS has its own certs, like MAMP does, and does not use the system keychain certs.

I downloaded the newest cacert for curl from their website and that fixed it.

Thanks!