Sometimes developing functionality requires our installation to have a valid certificate. There are many reasons, for example some JavaScript APIs are only available on HTTPS (for example navigator.mediaDevices - see the full list). This works on localhost because some, if not all, browsers have an exception for localhost. But if we want to connect our mobile phone to that installation we will be getting errors if the connection is not secure.

If you get an error when making a connection to a remote server (for example using $.GET()) with the following error message it might look that there is something wrong or malicious going on with the SSL certificate of the remote server.

PKIX path building failed:
sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException:
unable to find valid certification path to requested target

But maybe the SSL certificate is simply not included in the default java trust store. If you trust(!) the certificate there is a simple fix for this…

LetsEncrypt provides free SSL certificates which are valid for a 3-month period (after which you can create a new certificate). This is awesome! But scheduling to create a new certificate every 90 days is annoying.

Luckily Structr allows us to automate this...