Certificates that cause headaches in development
Sandboxes for payment gateways (Stripe, PayPal, Braintree), government APIs and corporate staging environments frequently use self-signed, expired or incorrect Common Name SSL certificates. By default, any HTTP client will reject these certificates — making integration testing impossible.
httpdrop's Proxy Mode lets you ignore SSL errors when forwarding requests, making these environments accessible during development and testing.
SSL errors you'll encounter
Expired certificate — The staging environment didn't get its cert renewed. Happens frequently in environments that receive less attention than production.
Self-signed certificate — The CA is not recognized by the system. Common in internal environments and corporate VPNs.
Incorrect Common Name — The cert was issued for
api.company.com but you're accessing via staging.company.com.Unknown CA — Certificate issued by an internal CA that isn't in the server's list of trusted CAs.
How to configure
- 1Open the endpoint in httpdrop and go to the Proxy tab.
- 2Enter the target API URL (e.g.
https://sandbox.mypartner.com). - 3Enable the "Ignore SSL certificate errors" option.
- 4All requests to the httpdrop endpoint will be forwarded to the destination without SSL validation.
Dev/test only: Ignoring SSL errors disables a critical security protection. Never use this option when pointing to production APIs. httpdrop shows a visible warning when this option is active.