fetch: authentication error on FreeBSD
SoftwareIf you download a file over TLS with fetch(1) in FreeBSD base and get the following error…
# fetch https://$URL
fetch: https://$URL: Authentication error
… it means you don’t have a certificate store installed for fetch to validate the site’s certificate against. Here’s the Mozilla one you can use, with the usual caveats and warnings about checking this yourself before installing:
# pkg install -y ca_root_nss
You can also download without verifying the certificate. Which you definitely shouldn’t do unless under extenuating circumstances:
# fetch --no-verify-peer https://$URL
As an aside, fetch is pretty great. I made it a challenge to run more stock FreeBSD last year, and I’ve been using it in lieu of curl (and I suppose wget) I do miss being able to specify ranges in curl, but it’s nothing a shell script to feed fetch a range of addresses to couldn’t fix. It’s also available in pkgsrc thanks to joerg@.
(I even had a third party tool I was using that expected curl, which I aliased to a script that fed the URL to fetch. I can’t say this is good practice at all, but it worked!)
