WordPress could not establish a secure connection to www.ads-software.com

This message appeared after trying to build a theme from scratch following the
steps from a youtube tutorial by alecaddd(Alessandro Castellani):
How to build a Premium Theme for WordPress – Lesson 5
How to create Custom Social Media Fields and Sanitize Callbacks

Check “Plugins / Add New” page. If the same error message appears instead of the featured plugins list, then it basically means that your Web server can’t connect to the Web.
Try temporary disable firewall and see if problem is solved. And if it is – you need to add rules for outgoing traffic for your WebServer (httpd in Apache case).

You can also try to config the wp-config.php file adding proxy rules to it.

Other option is to check if SSL module is enabled in your WebServer (mod_ssl in Apache).

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Mateus Getulio Vieira.

How are you hosting your site?

1st Reply to Mateus:
1. The same error message appears on “Plugins / Add New” page.
What do you mean by saying that my Web server can’t connect to the Web?
When I check the status of apache server it says that it’s running. Is’nt it the same thing?
2. I didn’t have any firewall installed on my ubuntu 16.04 until you mentioned it, so I went and installed from the software center the firewall configuration called Sundry which has prechecked the options public form the zone area and dhcpv6-client and ssh from the services area.
3. How can I add rules for outgoing traffic for my WebServer (httpd in Apache case)?
4.I tried to config the wp-config.php file adding proxy rules to it by adding the following code but it didn’t work.

define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);
if (strpos($_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO’], ‘https’) !== false)
$_SERVER[‘HTTPS’]=’on’;
5. I checked if SSL module is enabled on my WebServer (mod_ssl in Apache) by running the Openssl command in terminal and in response it prompted the OpenSSL> waiting from me to type some command.

2nd reply to Steve.
I should mention from the start that I don’t have any site with domain name hosted in HostGator or somewhere similar, just an https://localhost/wordpress installation.
I think that this must have been caused by some kind of conflict with the themes that come preinstalled with the 4.9.1 version of WordPress.
At the beginning of his tutorial alecaddd(Alessandro Castellani) had straightened it out that we should have a clean installation of WordPress because conflicts may occur, but I just deleted all the plugins, posts, and pages from WordPress.

The issue is that your localhost installation does not have a proper SSL library installed. When you try to connect to www.ads-software.com via SSL, you’re not presenting valid encryption “stuff”, so www.ads-software.com is rejecting the connection.

It’s not a WordPress issue. It’s your local hosting that’s incorrectly set up.

Once again, how are you hosting this site?

Reply to Steve
I tried to install SSL library by running the following commands

1. sudo openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /home/greg/localhost.key -out /home/greg/localhost.crt
2. sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/https.conf
3. inside https.conf i entered

listen 443
<VirtualHost *:443>
ServerName localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile “/home/greg/localhost.crt”
SSLCertificateKeyFile “/home/greg/localhost.key”
<Directory /var/www/html>
AllowOverride all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
4. sudo a2enmod ssl
5. sudo service apache2 restart
And after typing https://localhost/
Welcome to nginx!

If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and working. Further configuration is required.

For online documentation and support please refer to nginx.org.
Commercial support is available at nginx.com.

Thank you for using nginx.
————————————
Before installing a LAMP stack I installed a LEMP stack.
Since then I can’t remove nginx from my system.
I tried the following commands but it’s still there
sudo apt-get purge nginx nginx-common
sudo apt-get autoremove
I found this site https://www.nginx.com/blog/welcome-to-nginx-on-my-favourite-website/ and cleared the cache but still there. This site says also that my computer has a virus or other malware.

ThT updates the certificate but not the libraries.

ThT updates the certificate but not the libraries.

ThT updates the certificate but not the libraries.

I have no idea what you’re talking about and after doing a google search I found nothing.
Any suggestions?

Do you have the latest openSSL libraries installed?

I just installed the latest version of OpenSSL libraries. I had the 2016 version.
Now the final output after the installation says:
OpenSSL 1.0.2n 7 Dec 2017
I refreshed the WordPress and now a different message appears :

( ! ) Warning: An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with www.ads-software.com or this server’s configuration. If you continue to have problems, please try the support forums. (WordPress could not establish a secure connection to www.ads-software.com. Please contact your server administrator.) in /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/plugin-install.php on line 168
Call Stack
# Time Memory Function Location
1 0.0001 360392 {main}( ) …/plugin-install.php:0
2 0.0999 3012888 WP_Plugin_Install_List_Table->prepare_items( ) …/plugin-install.php:39
3 0.1005 3014192 plugins_api( ) …/class-wp-plugin-install-list-table.php:225
4 0.1013 3020896 trigger_error ( ) …/plugin-install.php:168

I’m sorry, this is the full error output:

( ! ) Warning: An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with www.ads-software.com or this server’s configuration. If you continue to have problems, please try the support forums. (WordPress could not establish a secure connection to www.ads-software.com. Please contact your server administrator.) in /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/plugin-install.php on line 168
Call Stack
# Time Memory Function Location
1 0.0001 360392 {main}( ) …/plugin-install.php:0
2 0.1445 3153336 do_action( ) …/plugin-install.php:158
3 0.1445 3153712 WP_Hook->do_action( ) …/plugin.php:453
4 0.1445 3153712 WP_Hook->apply_filters( ) …/class-wp-hook.php:310
5 0.1445 3154840 install_dashboard( ) …/class-wp-hook.php:286
6 0.1450 3155240 install_popular_tags( ) …/plugin-install.php:248
7 0.1473 3155560 plugins_api( ) …/plugin-install.php:224
8 0.1481 3158360 trigger_error ( ) …/plugin-install.php:168

I don’t know if it matters but I saved this version of OpenSSL in a different folder than the previous version according to this website https://www.linuxhelp.com/how-to-install-and-update-openssl-on-ubuntu-16-04/
The previous version was installed in /home/greg/