Update SSL Certificates inside dockerfile - r

Question

I have the following dockerfile:
FROM rocker/tidyverse:3.5.2
RUN apt-get update
# System dependices for R packages
RUN apt-get install -y \
git \
make \
curl \
libcurl4-openssl-dev \
libssl-dev \
pandoc \
libxml2-dev \
unixodbc \
libsodium-dev \
tzdata
# Clean up package installations
RUN apt-get clean
# ODBC system dependencies
RUN apt-get install -y gnupg apt-transport-https
RUN curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | apt-key add -
RUN curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/debian/9/prod.list > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mssql-release.list
RUN apt-get update
RUN ACCEPT_EULA=Y apt-get install msodbcsql17 -y
# Install renv (package management)
ENV RENV_VERSION 0.11.0
RUN R -e "install.packages('remotes', repos = c(CRAN = 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))"
RUN R -e "remotes::install_github('rstudio/renv#${RENV_VERSION}')"
# Specify USER for rstudio session
ENV USER rstudio
COPY ./renv.lock /renv/tmp/renv.lock
WORKDIR /renv/tmp
RUN R -e 'renv::consent(provided = TRUE)'
RUN R -e "renv::restore()"
WORKDIR /home/$USER
I use this image to recreate environments for R scripting purposes. This was working for a number of months up until the end of September when I started getting:
Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle) :
SSL certificate problem: certificate has expired
This occured when using GET request to query a website. How do I update my certificate now and in the future to avoid certificates expiring...I do not want to use the "config(ssl_verifypeer = FALSE)" workaround.

Answer 1

This happened to me too. Any chance you are working on MacOS or Linux based machine? It seems to be a bug:
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/232445/https-connection-to-specific-sites-fail-with-curl-on-macos
ca-certificates Mac OS X
SSL Certificates - OS X Mavericks
Instead of adjusting the certificates as is suggested here, you can simply set R to not verify the peer. Just add the following line to the beginning of your code.
httr::set_config(config(ssl_verifypeer = FALSE, ssl_verifyhost = FALSE))