request to https://registry.npmjs.org/playwright failed, reason: unable to get local issuer certificate

[dyeske]

What happened?

I believe my root certs are up to date. I have ca-certificates installed via apt-get on Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS. I haven't tried to manually hit the site via openssl s_client yet, but I wanted to open this ticket in case someone else has had this same problem. I know my clock and date are valid.

I have the following output
npm ERR! code UNABLE_TO_GET_ISSUER_CERT_LOCALLY
npm ERR! errno UNABLE_TO_GET_ISSUER_CERT_LOCALLY
npm ERR! request to https://registry.npmjs.org/playwright failed, reason: unable to get local issuer certificate

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR! /home/redacted/.npm/_logs/2026-04-09T15_12_11_361Z-debug-0.log
npm install 2.22s user 0.90s system 4% cpu 1:08.91 total

Steps to reproduce

cd career-ops
npm install

Expected behavior

npm should have completed

OS

Ubuntu noble

[kparr017-web]

Very interesting let me help ?

[kparr017-web]

I have to get on the computer

[dyeske]

% npm version
{
'career-ops': '1.0.0',
npm: '9.2.0',
node: '18.19.1',
acorn: '8.8.1',
ada: '2.7.2',
ares: '1.27.0',
base64: '0.5.0',
brotli: '1.1.0',
cjs_module_lexer: '1.2.3',
cldr: '44.1',
icu: '74.2',
llhttp: '6.1.0',
modules: '109',
napi: '9',
nghttp2: '1.59.0',
openssl: '3.0.13',
simdutf: '3.2.18',
tz: '2023c',
unicode: '15.1',
uv: '1.48.0',
uvwasi: '0.0.19',
v8: '10.2.154.26-node.28',
zlib: '1.3'
}

This is my situation. If it is crap, I accept it, and I will switch to nvm. Thank you in advance for feedback.

[dyeske]

This was caused by a freak scenario that I've never seen before. I ran wget manually as a test using the following.

wget --ca-certificate=/etc/ssl/certs/ISRG_Root_X1.pem https://changelogs.ubuntu.com/meta-release-lts

This resulted in success. I ran wget again without passing the --ca-certificate flag. That failed against TLS sites like npmjs.org. I ran it through strace, and it was looking for openssl.cf and cert.pem in /usr/local/ssl. I copied those files from /etc/ssl to where wget wanted them, and now everything works. Curl never had an issue. Anyways, this was user error, and I'm owning it.