ssl.SSLError: tlsv1 alert protocol version

I had the same error and google brought me to this question, so here is what I did, hoping that it helps others in a similar situation.

This is applicable for OS X.

Check in the Terminal which version of OpenSSL I had:

$ python3 -c "import ssl; print(ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION)">> OpenSSL 0.9.8zh 14 Jan 2016

As my version of OpenSSL was too old, the accepted answer did not work.

So I had to update OpenSSL. To do this, I updated Python to the latest version (from version 3.5 to version 3.6) with Homebrew, following some of the steps suggested here:

$ brew update$ brew install openssl$ brew install python3

Then I was having problems with the PATH and the version of python being used, so I just created a new virtualenv making sure that the newest version of python was taken:

$ virtualenv webapp --python=python3.6

Issue solved.

The only thing you have to do is to install requests[security] in your virtualenv. You should not have to use Python 3 (it should work in Python 2.7). Moreover, if you are using a recent version of macOS, you don't have to use homebrew to separately install OpenSSL either.

$ virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python tempenv  # uses system python$ . tempenv/bin/activate$ pip install requests$ python>>> import ssl>>> ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION'OpenSSL 0.9.8zh 14 Jan 2016'  # this is the built-in openssl>>> import requests>>> requests.get('https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs')requests.exceptions.SSLError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='api.github.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /users/octocat/orgs (Caused by SSLError(SSLError(1, u'[SSL: TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION] tlsv1 alert protocol version (_ssl.c:590)'),))$ pip install 'requests[security]'$ python  # install requests[security] and try again>>> import requests>>> requests.get('https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs')<Response [200]>

requests[security] allows requests to use the latest version of TLS when negotiating the connection. The built-in openssl on macOS supports TLS v1.2.

Before you install your own version of OpenSSL, ask this question: how is Google Chrome loading https://github.com?

I believe TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION is alerting you that the server doesn't want to talk TLS v1.0 to you. Try to specify TLS v1.2 only by sticking in these lines:

import sslfrom http.client import HTTPSConnectioncontext = ssl.SSLContext(ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1_2)# Create HTTPS connectionc = HTTPSConnection("0.0.0.0", context=context)

Note, you may need sufficiently new versions of Python (2.7.9+ perhaps?) and possibly OpenSSL (I have "OpenSSL 1.0.2k 26 Jan 2017" and the above seems to work, YMMV)