Debug SSL in Java

Certificates can be tricky to debug because they do not always give you a helpful error messages. To be able to turn the JVM debug mode on can be a great help. I will here show two methods to enable debug mode for SSL:

As an VM option

java -Djavax.net.debug=ssl:handshake myprogram

Or as a system property (in your code):

System.setProperty("javax.net.debug", "ssl:handshake");

Hope it will help you track down that nasty SSL bug 🙂

Tested on OSX 10.15.6, Java 1.8.0_252

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