Self Signed SSL Certificate in NextJS

Problem Statement#

Recently, I encountered the Error DEPTH_ZERO_SELF_SIGNED_CERT with a NextJS app. After millenias of debugging, of course, since no meaningful error message arose. My app simply refused to process requests to the /api/* routes of the app.

Reading multiple GitHub Discussion, GitHub Issues and StackOverflow answers like:

• https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/10935
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70440486/locally-developing-nextjs-and-fetch-getting-self-signed-cert-error/71558621

brought me nowhere.

There are several development scenarios in which self signing a certificate is useful and common practice so I was a bit salty about the lacking support.

Solution#

I found the solution to this problem buried somewhere deep in the Node documentation. There is an option to disable the rejection of unauthorized TLS certiticates NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED. So, adding this to NextJS dev script did the trick for me:

...
"scripts": {
        "dev": "NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0 next dev",
		...
    },
...