continuedev/continue · warning

Empty certificate found at ${path}

Error message

Empty certificate found at ${path}

What it means

While aggregating custom TLS certificates, getAllCachedCustomCerts maps over configured cert paths; if a path exists but resolves to empty content (getCachedCustomCert returns falsy), this warning is logged — and only when VERBOSE_FETCH is set, otherwise it is silent. The empty cert is simply not added to the bundle.

Source

Thrown at packages/fetch/src/certs.ts:100

    }
    const certContent = getCertificateContent(path);
    this._customCerts.set(path, certContent);
    return certContent;
  }

  async getAllCachedCustomCerts(
    caBundlePath: string[] | string,
  ): Promise<string[]> {
    const paths = Array.isArray(caBundlePath) ? caBundlePath : [caBundlePath];
    const certs: string[] = [];
    await Promise.all(
      paths.map(async (path) => {
        try {
          const certContent = await this.getCachedCustomCert(path);
          if (certContent) {
            certs.push(certContent);
          } else if (process.env.VERBOSE_FETCH) {
            console.warn(`Empty certificate found at ${path}`);
          }
        } catch (error) {
          if (process.env.VERBOSE_FETCH) {
            console.error(
              `Error loading custom certificate from ${path}:`,
              error,
            );
          }
        }
      }),
    );
    return certs;
  }

  async getCa(caBundlePath: undefined | string | string[]): Promise<string[]> {
    if (!caBundlePath) {
      return this.fixedCa;
    }

View on GitHub (pinned to 5522c6f44c)

Solutions

1. Inspect the file at the reported path: `ls -la <path>` and `wc -c <path>` to confirm it is empty
2. Restore or regenerate the PEM bundle so it contains a full -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- block
3. Remove the path from custom certificate configuration if it is no longer needed
4. Set VERBOSE_FETCH=1 while debugging to surface these otherwise-silent skips

for (const p of certPaths) {
  const stat = await fs.stat(p);
  if (stat.size === 0) throw new Error(`Empty certificate file: ${p}`);
}

When it happens

Trigger: Configuring a custom CA bundle path whose file is zero bytes, contains only whitespace, or was truncated; running with VERBOSE_FETCH=1 to see the diagnostic.

Common situations: Empty/truncated .pem created by a failed curl, a mount point with an unreadable file, or a CI cache that produced a 0-byte cert; corporate MITM proxy CA setup where the injected file is empty.

Understand the failure class

• SSL/TLS and certificate errors — how TLS handshakes and certificate validation fail.

Related errors

• Profile ${profileId} not found
• HTTP ${resp.status} ${resp.statusText}
• No reranker set up
• No chat model selected
• Failed to load config

AI-assisted analysis of continuedev/continue@5522c6f44c (2026-08-27). Data as JSON: /api/errors/50d59dfc318279b9. Report an issue: GitHub.