Adding SSL certificate for Github only (not all certificates from ca-certificates package)

certificatesgitgithubssl

I get the following error when accessing Github over HTTPS:

error: server certificate verification failed. 
CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt CRLfile: none

This is because I don't have any certificates in /etc/ssl/certs/. I know how to fix this problem. I can install the package ca-certificates from Debian repository. The problem is, however, that this will install all certificates (thousands) which I don't necessarily want to accept/trust.

How can I install certificate for Github only?

a Subproblem/Subquestion

On another machine, where the package ca-certificates is already installed and git works, I have noticed that some certificates in /etc/ssl/certs/ are one-certificate-per-file and other are many-certificates-in-one-file. The particular file containing Github certificate, /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt contains over 150 other certificates:

$ grep 'BEGIN CERTIFICATE' /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt | wc -l
159

How can I find which one out of these 159 certificate is the one I need? (other than brute force – slicing the file in halves and checking both halves, repeating while n > 1).

Best Answer

In order to access your Github you need to do it via ssh. So you need to add your ssh public key to github. After that you are able to access github via ssh i.e.:

git init git@github.com:yourname/yourrepo.git

See also: Github: generating ssh keys, WikiHow

[Edit #1]

without certificate checks:

GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY=true git clone https://github.com/p/repo.git

or authenticated

GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY=true git clone https://user@pass:github.com/p/repo.git

For me it is still not clear what are you asking for, because you know that installing ca-certificates will fix the problem.

[Edit #2]

Ok, the other question was

how to have only the certificate which is needed to access github.com via https

  1. Open your browser and navigate to https://github.com/. Klick on the green name on the left from https:// and klick on Certificates. On the Details tab, you'll see the certificate chain, which is:

    DigiCert ...
  DigiCert ...
   github.com ...

  2. Export each of the DigiCert certicates to a file.

  3. copy the files to /etc/ssl/certs/
  4. run c_rehash which cat all certificates to ca-certificates.crt
  5. you are done.

As I said, I am not a friend of such actions because github can change the CA's anytime, so it will always result in additional work.

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