Quick Tip - Certificates in Apple Keychain causes Terraform init to fail with Registry service unreachable

I have been struggling with an interesting Terraform issue on my MacOS system where running the "init" operation would throw the following error:

Initializing the backend...

Initializing provider plugins...
- Checking for available provider plugins...

Registry service unreachable.

This may indicate a network issue, or an issue with the requested Terraform Registry.

Error: registry service is unreachable, check https://status.hashicorp.com/ for status updates

This was extremely frustrating to debug which I had filed a Github issue here. From what I have gathered, this actually had nothing to do with connectivity to the HashiCorp endpoint which works perfectly but probably was related to some other issue. What was even more strange was that using "sudo" which another user reported in an older issue allowed the operation to go through. I was also not having this problem on my other MacOS system, so I knew this was probably environmental but was running out of ideas to try.

I took another look this past weekend while doing some testing and I stumbled onto this thread here which the user found the real root cause. It looks like certain certificates within Apple Keychain Access, possibly related to Microsoft Remote Desktop that have expired was actually causing the problem. When I took at look at the Keychain Access login->certificates, I saw a number of certificates which had expired but were still marked trusted. After removing these entries (although this can be automated using the security utility, it was not trivial given the lack of arguments to quickly list out expired certificates), that I simply used the UI to delete the entries.

Once all the expired certificates were removed, I was able to successfully perform the Terraform init operation! I have already shared this update in my Github issue and hopefully this error message can be improved in the future as it was very miss-leading on the actual issue.