RSelenium rsDriver peer SSL certificate issue - r

Question

I am trying to learn using RSelenium. I am stuck with just trying to start the server using rsDriver. I am simply trying to run the code below and got the following error:
rD <- rsDriver()
checking Selenium Server versions:
BEGIN: PREDOWNLOAD
Error in open.connection(con, "rb") :
Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with given CA certificates
I searched around stack overflow and found out we can give options to rsDriver using below but I still got error:
my_extra <- list("--ignore-ssl-errors=true", "--ssl-protocol=tlsv1", "--web-security=no")
rs <- rsDriver(extraCapabilities = my_extra)
checking Selenium Server versions:
BEGIN: PREDOWNLOAD
Error in open.connection(con, "rb") :
Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with given CA certificates
Is there anything else I am missing?
for httr::GET function, I am able to bypass the SSL Certificate using:
set_config(config(ssl_verifypeer=0L)).
But this method does not work for RSelenium::rsDriver.
Here is my system spec:
My OS: Microsoft Windows 10
R version 3.4.1 (2017-06-30)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows >= 8 x64 (build 9200)
Matrix products: default
locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
other attached packages:
[1] RCurl_1.95-4.8 bitops_1.0-6 httr_1.2.1 wdman_0.2.2
[5] RSelenium_1.7.1
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] Rcpp_0.12.12 XML_3.98-1.9 binman_0.1.0 assertthat_0.2.0
[5] R6_2.2.2 jsonlite_1.5 semver_0.2.0 curl_2.7
[9] tools_3.4.1 yaml_2.1.14 compiler_3.4.1 caTools_1.17.1
[13] openssl_0.9.6

Answer 1

rsDriver uses the binman package to handle the downloading of relevant binaries. The selenium project lists its release in a JSON file at https://www.googleapis.com/storage/v1/b/selenium-release/o
You should have the same issue if you try:
jsonlite::fromJSON("https://www.googleapis.com/storage/v1/b/selenium-release/o")
You can mock the relevant curl fundtion using something like:
my_new_handle <- function(...){
print("mocking")
h <- .Call(curl:::R_new_handle, PACKAGE = "curl")
curl:::handle_setopt(h, ..., ssl_verifypeer = FALSE)
h
}
testthat::with_mock(
`curl::new_handle` = my_new_handle,
{
selCommand <- httr::with_config(config(ssl_verifypeer=0L),wdman::selenium(‌​retcommand=TRUE))
}
)