CFHTTP and Pivotal Tracker API

November 11, 2010

We use the awesome Pivotal Tracker to manage our projects. We've integrated some of our other systems with Pivotal Tracker to help our clients see clearly how our time correlates to their user stories.

Pivotal Tracker switched to SSL-only over the weekend, and one of legacy ColdFusion-based systems wasn't able to communicate with it. The CFHTTP request were failing with a "Connection Failure: Status code unavailable" message.
On a hunch, I guessed that it might be that the old ColdFusion 7 that this system ran on didn't have a proper chain of trust for Tracker's SSL certificate. A bit of Googling later, I found a command that would let me import the SSL certificate into the JRE's keystore, and now we can talk to Tracker again!
Steps:
  1. Grab the certificate (I used Chrome, brought up the certificate info, and dragged the certificate onto my desktop, then scp'ed it to the server.)
  2. cd /usr/local/java/j2re1.4.2_13;
  3. sudo bin/keytool -import -trustcacerts -keystore lib/security/cacerts -storepass changeit -noprompt -alias pivotaltracker -file ~/download/www.pivotaltracker.com.cer
  4. Restart ColdFusion (not sure if this was necessary)