# Django, requests and..

Moving from ngrok to nginx proxy manager (upcoming article) put me in the situation where I needed to get *requests* to accept a self signed certificate to avoid the dreaded **SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED**

*verify=False* or *verify=/path/to/ca.pem* is not an option since only the development system is running behind layered firewalls with self signed certificates.

This proved to be quite straight forward. 

Update your apps *apps.py* file

```python
from django.apps import AppConfig
import requests
import certifi
from django.conf import settings

class MyAppConfig(AppConfig):
        name = yourapp

        def ready(self): -> None
            try:
                requests.get(settings.FILESTORE_URL)
            except requests.exceptions.SSLError as err:
                logger.info(
                    f"SSL Error on app init. Adding ca.pem to certificate store. {err}",
                )
                store = certifi.where()
                with open(store, "ab") as outfile:
                    with open("./certs/ca.pem", "rb") as infile:
                        outfile.write(infile.read())
            
```
This will ensure that if you need the *ca.pem* it will be added to the certifi ca store(if using podman/docker, remember to copy the *ca.pem* file into your container).

> ** _NOTE_:** On a side note - how to get the pem?
If you have created, as you should, a local signing authority, create the pem by

```sh
$ cat ca.key > ca.pem
$ cat ca.crt >> ca.pem
```