While using elasticdump to dump an elasticsearch index to a JSON file, I got the following error message:

Error Emitted => SELF_SIGNED_CERT_IN_CHAIN

This basically means that we are accessing elasticsearch using an HTTPS connection and the certificate it gets is self-signed (and thus cannot be verified).

Googling for this issue I mostly found questions from people who get this error message when using NPM. But all answers were basically aimed at making it work in NPM by disabling the strict SSL rule in the NPM config (npm config set strict-ssl false), setting an HTTP URL as HTTPS proxy (npm config set https-proxy “http://:8080”), using an HTTP URL for the registry (npm config set registry=”http://registry.npmjs.org/”) or having npm use known registrars (npm config set ca=””).

But none of this could help me since I do not have an issue using NPM but using another Node application. The only think I eventually found was to set an environment variable so that NodeJS would not reject self signed certificates:

export NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0

After that elasticdump was working fine. But keep in mind that using this method for temporarily using a NodejS software is fine, but using this setting in production is not a good idea.

Update for Windows users:

On Windows use the following:

set NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0