SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED error with python3 on macOS 10.15

Question

/usr/bin/python3 from Xcode/CLT on macOS 10.15 (DB6/PB5 at the moment, with Xcode 11 beta 6) fails with SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED for all HTTPS re

Answer 1

According to this GitHub issue, Apple refused to fix this:

The problem behaves as intended.

certifi is a third-party module, not part of Python itself.

urllib is a low-level library. It can handle SSL, but you must explicitly set up the SSL context with a cafile.

Try the following instead:

pip3 install requests
python3 -c 'import requests; print(requests.get("https://apple.com").text)'

If you only want to get cacert.pem, you can use pip3 install certifi, but you must still explicitly pass cafile to urllib.

So my solution is simply using Requests instead. This is supported and future proof.