How do I get Visual Studio Code to trust our self-signed proxy certificate?

Question

Our corporate firewall/proxy is keeping VS Code from being able to install extensions because Code doesn\'t trust something in the chain. It doesn\'t reliably give an error,

Answer 1

This is a terrible answer (not very secure), but appears to be the current Microsoft official answer. Use "http.proxyStrictSSL": false in your settings.json file.

This should work to get around the issue of installing extensions inside a corporate network, but I'd recommend disabling the setting if you are going to be working from home/coffee shop and not connected to the corporate VPN.

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/3492

Answer 2

There is actually a better way:

Since VS Code is built on Chromium the "proxy settings should be picked up automatically" from Google Chrome/Chromium. So if you add your self-signed certificate in Chrome/Chromium by going to:

1. chrome://settings/privacy
2. Manage certificates
3. Authorities / Import
4. Select and import your certificate (pem-file)
5. Restart VS Code

I was able to download VS Code extensions despite being behind a corporate proxy.

Remark: Ubuntu 18.04 and VS Code works only with Chrome and not Chromium.

Answer 3

2020 answer for MacOS Catalina and possibly others: Make sure that the certificates are installed and trusted (I have them in the System category).

Then, go into settings, Application, Proxy, and UNCHECK the "System certificates" option. Restart vscode and RE-CHECK it. Restart again, and it works.

No idea why you have to do this, but it worked for me. I was very surprised. The error I was getting in the developer console (Help - toggle developer tools - console tab) was "self signed certificate in certificate chain".

Answer 4

I was having the same issue, not when installing an extension, but when a certain extension was trying to download data. Adding "http.proxyStrictSSL": false to my settings file did not work. Disabling SSL is also a really bad idea.

The resolution was to install the Visual Studio Code win-ca plugin which makes trusted Windows certificates available to extensions.