Connect to a Server with SSL: How to Use the Certificate

How to use the certificate

Ignoring a self-signed cert is fine while developing and testing a REST client. However, for the release phase, the application needs to load and validate the certificate sent by the server using it.

The self-signed certs aren’t available in the certs cache/pool of the operating system. Hence, for an application to use them, it needs to do the following:

1. Load the cert.
2. Pass the cert to the requests library so that it can use the cert for validation.

The requests library loads and passes the cert automatically via the ssl_verify option. It’s the same ssl_verify option we used to ignore cert validation in the last lesson.

The service that we’ll use for checking our code will be https://self-signed.badssl.com, as it provides a self-signed certificate for testing purposes. We’ll also need to export the cert of the site to be used in the code.

Note: We’ll reuse and update the code that ...