Ignoring SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED issue

There are a million and one SSL issues you can end up encountering on Python. Some of the most common scream about CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED, or more specifically something like this:

   1348         h.request(req.get_method(), req.selector, req.data, headers,
   1349                   encode_chunked=req.has_header('Transfer-encoding'))
   1350     except OSError as err: # timeout error
-> 1351         raise URLError(err)
   1352     r = h.getresponse()
   1353 except:

URLError: <urlopen error [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: certificate has expired (_ssl.c:992)>

If we're using requests, there are all sorts of ways to get around this. The easiest is to just add verify=False to your requests.get() call. This will ignore the SSL certificate and let us move on with your life.

If we're using pd.read_csv to have pandas read a CSV from a remote server, though, it isn't that easy! You can't just add verify=False to the call! Instead, we'll do this:

import ssl

ssl._create_default_https_context = ssl._create_unverified_context

df = pd.read_csv(...)
df.head()

And then we'll be able to read the CSV!

Normally the ssl library uses _create_default_https_context to create a nice secure https connection. In this case, though, the https connection won't work, so we're overwriting _create_default_https_context with _create_unverified_context, which will just ignore the SSL certificate.

It's not a great solution, but it's a solution!