"Certificate issuer is unknown" error on internal sites

I’ve been using Caddy for just over a week now and I’m very frustrated, apparently because I do not understand enough about certificates.

I have been reading the caddy/community topics but they seem to presume a lot more basic understanding.

My site is completely internal to my LAN, but I access it from a few different Macs on the LAN. Every time, the browser (Chrome or Firefox) says the “certificate issuer is unknown, the certificate is self-signed, or the server is not sending the correct intermediate certificates. SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER.”

I have installed the Caddy certifiicate on each system’s keychain and ensured it is trusted – but these errors seem to be about my host system, not Caddy.

The Internal-only certificates part of this topic leaves me completely baffled.

It is beginning to look like I can not use Caddy because I don’t understand networking well enough. I’d hate to go back to Apache, but it let me run with http instead of https so I had none of this trouble.

Is there anywhere I can go for help before abandoning Caddy?

You can always run over HTTP if you want to. There’s not really any useful information in your post though so I’m not sure how to help. I imagine you’re using the Caddyfile? Just prefix your site address with http:// to use HTTP.

It’s always better to debug with something like curl because browsers do all sorts of weird things and often have bugs (most recently, macOS’s verifier is broken). curl -v is your friend.

For more help, please fill out the help template for this category (create a new topic to see the template) - we’ll need your full config, system setup, how you run caddy, what you did, and the full and complete logs and error messages.

Yes, we do expect that people know how to use their computers and/or know how networks work when they use Caddy; it’s out of the scope of our documentation to teach all that. But fortunately it’s pretty easy to find random blog posts on google; higher-quality content can be found in books and online courses. Thanks for understanding!

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