How to Ignore SSL Certificate Errors in cURL: Complete Guide

SSL certificates, more accurately TLS certificates, are what help browsers and tools like cURL confirm a website is genuine. They do this by checking the certificate comes from a trusted authority, matches the domain you requested and is still valid. When any of those checks fail, you will often see a warning or a blocked request because the client cannot reliably verify who it is talking to. Now, that does not always mean the site is unsafe, sometimes the certificate simply expired or the chain is misconfigured. In this guide, you will learn what are these SSL certificates, their common errors, and why you might want to bypass them with cURL.

Valentin Ghita

Technical Writer, Marketing, Research

Mihalcea Romeo

Co-Founder, CTO

updated 2026-04-03T04:28:03.672Z

An Overview of cURL and SSL

cURL is a practical command line tool that sends requests to a URL and prints the server’s response. It is widely used to test APIs, download resources, and automate routine web interactions because it is fast, scriptable, and easy to reproduce.

When you connect to an HTTPS address, there is one extra step before any real data moves. The server has a TLS certificate, which is basically its digital ID that helps to set up encryption, so all of your important details remain private while browsing the internet. By default, cURL verifies that certificate automatically on HTTPS requests before it sends anything sensitive. If the certificate looks wrong or untrusted, cURL will stop and show an SSL error. That is usually a good thing, but in some controlled situations it can get in the way, which is where the next section comes in.

When Disabling SSL Verification Can Make Sense?

To disable the SSL certificate verification is not something you do lightly, but there are moments where it is a practical choice for a developer who understands the risks. The most common case is a local or staging environment using a self-signed certificate or an internal domain your computer does not trust yet. You know the server is yours, but cURL does not have that context, so it blocks the request.

It can also help during troubleshooting. Skipping verification for a moment lets you confirm whether the server is reachable at all, or whether the certificate check is the only thing stopping the connection.

Sometimes you are stuck with an older internal service that has a broken chain or outdated configuration and cannot be fixed immediately. In that situation, bypassing checks can keep work moving while a proper update is planned.

Don't forget that:

If you remove an identity check, you can increase exposure to man-in-the-middle attacks. Be sure that you use it briefly, never in production, and always switch to a trusted certificate as soon as possible.

How to Ignore SSL Certificate Errors With cURL?

When you are working with a development or staging HTTPS server, it is common to run into a certificate that your computer does not recognize yet. In that moment, cURL is doing its job by refusing the connection and showing an SSL certificate error. Now, if you just need to move forward for a quick test, you can tell cURL to skip the verification using the -k flag.

You can also use the longer, more explicit version of the same option, --insecure.

Both commands will let the request go through, but only use them for short-term debugging. They turn off a key security check that normally helps you confirm you are connecting to the right server.

Common cURL SSL Certificate Errors

When you use cURL with an HTTPS URL, it tries to confirm the server is trustworthy before it sends or receives anything important. If that check fails, cURL stops and prints an error (usually curl: (60)), which is your signal that something about the TLS certificate does not add up. Below are some of the most common messages, and some quick ways you can use to bypass them while testing.

curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: certificate has expired

This one is the internet’s version of an expired ID card. The server is still there, but its certificate is past its valid date, so cURL will not trust it on HTTPS.

If you only need a quick test result, you can bypass the check temporarily:

curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: self-signed certificate in certificate chain

You will usually see this in staging or internal tools where someone created a certificate for convenience instead of using a trusted CA. cURL does not know who issued it, so it plays it safe and stops.

cURL self-signed certificate chain error

For short-lived debugging, you can force the request through:

curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate

This message usually means cURL is looking at the server’s certificate and thinking, “I cannot trace this back to anyone I trust.” In other words, your system’s trusted certificate list does not include the CA that issued the certificate, or the chain needed to prove it is incomplete.

To fix it properly, you have a couple of sensible options:

Install or provide the missing CA certificate so cURL can validate the chain normally using --cacert.
If you only need a quick, low-risk test, temporarily skip verification with -k or --insecure.

Conclusion

In this guide, we walked through how cURL and SSL or TLS certificates work together on HTTPS requests, why cURL checks certificates by default, and what usually causes the most common SSL errors.

cURL works in perfect synergy with any of our SOCKS5 proxies, datacenter proxies, isp proxies or residential proxies. Just pick the right one for your task.

We have also talked about whether it would be helpful to bypass certificate validation for testing/troubleshooting purposes, as well as how this will create additional security risk. Now, with all these in mind, you should be able to handle SSL issues more confidently and choose when a temporary bypass makes sense and when a proper certificate fix is the smarter move.