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Troubleshooting certificate errors for GitHub Copilot

Troubleshooting help for certificate-related errors.

GitHub Copilot can be managed through personal accounts with GitHub Copilot for Individuals or through organization accounts with GitHub Copilot for Business.

GitHub Copilot is free to use for verified students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open source projects. If you are not a student, teacher, or maintainer of a popular open source project, you can try GitHub Copilot for free with a one-time 30-day trial. After the free trial, you will need a paid subscription for continued use. For more information, see "About billing for GitHub Copilot."

Depending on your proxy setup, you may encounter errors like “certificate signature failure”, “self-signed certificate”, or “unable to verify the first certificate”. These errors are usually caused by a corporate proxy setup that intercepts secure connections, terminates the secure connection to GitHub, and instead uses a self-signed certificate to act like a TLS middleman. Support for this type of proxy is not available for all GitHub Copilot licenses. Possible ways to resolve this issue are:

  • If you are using a corporate proxy, please contact your IT department to see if they can configure the proxy to not intercept secure connections.

  • Properly install the proxy certificates on your machine in the OS trust chain.

    Note: This requires a GitHub Copilot for Business subscription. For more information about GitHub Copilot for Business, see "About GitHub Copilot for Business" in the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.

  • Configure a different proxy that does not intercept secure connections.

  • Configure GitHub Copilot to ignore certificate errors.

    Warning: Ignoring certificate errors is not recommended, since it might cause security issues.