I recently had the pleasure of working in a new space where normal git was blocked by a firewall. So I enabled SSL on my git server and modified my remote URLs to point to the new address. When I tried to pull, I got this gem:

brian$ git pull
error:  while accessing https://git.somedomain.com/project.git/info/refs

fatal: HTTP request failed

In fact even from a different location, the same thing happens. So what’s that up? The short of it is that git will attempt to verify SSL certificates and if that verification fails, you git the vague error above. Since I’m too cheap to use a paid CA, this situation applies to me. Thankfully the solution is straightforward. Just export the following environment variable and you’re set.

export GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY=true

Now if only that error message were a bit more obvious.