Certificate validation

Browser sessions validate TLS certificates. When a host presents a certificate the browser does not trust, the request fails and your automation receives a Chromium certificate error:

page.goto: net::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID at https://example.com/

The most common errors are:

Only top-level navigations raise an error your script can catch. A failing subresource, such as an analytics script on a page you are visiting, fails quietly unless you listen for the requestfailed event.

Trusting a private certificate authority

If the certificate comes from an authority you control, such as a corporate egress proxy, an MITM appliance, or your own test CA, upload that CA to your application and reference it when creating a session. The browser trusts it like any public authority and validation stays on everywhere else.

See Trusted CA certificates for the upload and usage steps.

Ignoring certificate errors

When the certificate belongs to a site you do not control, such as a target with an expired certificate that you still need to reach, set ignoreCertificateErrors to true. The session then accepts whatever certificate the host presents.

import Browsers from "@agentmq/browsers";

const browsers = new Browsers({ apiKey: process.env.AGENTMQ_TOKEN! });

async function createSession() {
  const session = await browsers.sessions.create({
    browserSettings: {
      ignoreCertificateErrors: true,
    },
  });
  console.log(`Session URL: https://agent.mq/sessions/${session.id}`);
  return session;
}

const session = createSession();

from agentmq.browsers import Browsers
import os

browsers = Browsers(api_key=os.environ["AGENTMQ_TOKEN"])

def createSession():
    session = browsers.sessions.create(
        browser_settings={
            "ignoreCertificateErrors": True,
        },
    )
    print(f"Session URL: https://agent.mq/sessions/{session.id}")
    return session

session = createSession()

Choosing between the two

A CA upload only resolves ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID, where the chain is valid but the browser does not know the issuer. Expired and hostname-mismatched certificates stay invalid no matter which authorities you trust, so those require ignoreCertificateErrors.

For a full list of session options and configuration fields, check out the API reference for creating a session.