Thanks to further information shared by Jakub Wilk, specifically the issue discussion being tracked here:
https://github.com/libwww-perl/lwp-protocol-https/pull/14 I was able to resolve connection issues with servers containing self-signed SSL (localized dev servers) using following method: Based on information in above link and a small patch to lwp-protocol-https as shown in link below: https://github.com/libwww-perl/lwp-protocol-https/pull/14#issuecomment-42950342 This fixes the real issue of $ssl_opt{ssl_verify_mode} getting clobbered and causing the failed connections to self-signed servers. While the fix is meant for versions < 1.950, it also work in 1.988-1. I can now ignore setting both environment variables: PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME and PERL_LWP_SSL_CA_PATH I instead opted to modify the library code my client-side tool depends on where LWP is being called and introduced a single option to specify accepting connections to self-signed servers. As noted by Jakub this is done with: $ua->ssl_opts( SSL_verify_mode => 0, verify_hostname => 0, ); So for me the fix was two-fold, avoid clobbering of ssl_verify_mode in lwp-protocol-https and set above options if connecting to self-signed SSL servers. With the clobbering part fixed other things such as GET/POST from LWP also work.
