Self signed certificate in certificate chain Error while using node.js SDK for watson assistant

Question

I have been using the IBM Watson API and its node.js SDK. The problem I am facing is that the call to the Watson API using the node.js SDK always returns me the following error.

{ Error: self signed certificate in certificate chain
    at TLSSocket.onConnectSecure (_tls_wrap.js:1049:34)
    at TLSSocket.emit (events.js:182:13)
    at TLSSocket._finishInit (_tls_wrap.js:631:8) code: 
'SELF_SIGNED_CERT_IN_CHAIN' }

I have tried setting the and 和 but with no luck.

var watson = require('watson-developer-cloud');

process.env.NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED = "0";

var assistant = new watson.AssistantV1({
  iam_apikey: 'API-KEY',
  version: '2018-09-20',
  url: 'URL'
});

assistant.message({
  workspace_id: 'WORKSPACE-ID',
  input: {'text': 'Input-Text'},
},  function(err, response) {
  if (err)
    console.log('error:', err);
  else
    console.log(JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));
});

Answer 1

The url and iam_apikey in the code are incorrect:

var assistant = new watson.AssistantV1({
  iam_apikey: 'API-KEY',
  version: '2018-09-20',
  url: 'URL'
});

In my code sample here https://github.com/IBM/watson-assistant-app-connect the initialization is:

const AssistantV1 = require('watson-developer-cloud/assistant/v1');

const assistant = new AssistantV1({
  url: 'https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/assistant/api',
  version: '2018-02-16'
});

It will pick up the api key from the environment variable ASSISTANT_IAM_APIKEY.

Answer 2

Temporarily I found the following workaround.

process.env.NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED = "0";

var assistant = new watson.AssistantV1({
  iam_apikey: YOUR-API-KEY,
  version: '2018-09-20',
  url: YOUR-URL,
  disable_ssl_verification: true
});

Here, setting disable_ssl_verification to true did the trick though I don't trust this to be a permanent way to move ahead with.

Answer 3

Please do not use process.env.NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED = "0"; . It's a setting that will affect not only the IBM Watson Node.js SDK but also all your application.

We added a specific variable in the constructor to deal with servers using a self-signed certificate. disable_ssl_verification only affect the HTTP library we use request .

var assistant = new watson.AssistantV1({
  iam_apikey: 'YOUR-API-KEY',
  version: '2018-09-20',
  url: 'YOUR-URL',
  disable_ssl_verification: true
});