Quick Tip – Workaround for x509: certificate signed by unknown authority when using Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) on Windows

Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) was just launched a few days ago and a lot of folks are kicking the tires. Just yesterday, I saw that we had already surpassed over 2K+ downloads, a huge achievement for the TCE team and lots of positive feedback like this and this.

I had a comment today from a reader who ran into the following error when using TCE for Windows:

Downloading TKG compatibility file from 'projects.registry.vmware.com/tkg/framework-zshippable/tkg-compatibility'
Error: unable to create Tanzu Standalone Cluster client
Cause: unable to ensure prerequisites: unable to ensure tkg BOM file: failed to download TKG compatibility file from the registry: failed to list TKG compatibility image tags: Get "https://projects.registry.vmware.com/v2/": x509: certificate signed by unknown authority

I immediately knew the issue as I ran into this myself a couple of days ago and started to look in TCE Github Issues.

This is currently a known issue for Windows that was reported awhile back and luckily, there is a quick workaround thanks to Steve Wong. Simply edit %USERPROFILE%\.config\tanzu\tkg\config.yaml configuration file and replace it with the following snippet:

release:
    version: ""
TKG_CUSTOM_IMAGE_REPOSITORY_SKIP_TLS_VERIFY: true

I have asked if the TCE folks can update the documentation to at least reference this workaround until this issue is resolved. I have noticed a few folks in TCE Slack channel also reporting this same issue and figure it was worth sharing in case others come across it.