Node fails to start if /etc/ssl is not accessible

[orgads]

Version

24.14.0

Platform

Linux

Subsystem

No response

What steps will reproduce the bug?

mkdir -pm 750 ssl || chmod 750 ssl
docker run --rm -it -v $PWD/ssl:/etc/ssl -u 999:999 node:24.14.0-alpine3.23 node
node: OpenSSL configuration error:
50B22C3DD67E0000:error:8000000D:system library:BIO_new_file:Permission denied:../deps/openssl/openssl/crypto/bio/bss_file.c:67:calling fopen(/etc/ssl/openssl.cnf, rb)

How often does it reproduce? Is there a required condition?

Always

What is the expected behavior? Why is that the expected behavior?

It should ignore this error and continue.

What do you see instead?

It quits immediately with fatal error.

Additional information

No response

[inoway46]

From what I can tell, this seems consistent with current Node.js behavior rather than an OpenSSL-side bug.

Node loads OpenSSL configuration during startup, and in this case the configuration load failure appears to be treated as fatal:

node/src/node.cc

Lines 1176 to 1187 in 8ccbe8e

	OPENSSL_init_crypto(OPENSSL_INIT_LOAD_CONFIG, settings);
	OPENSSL_INIT_free(settings);
	if (ERR_peek_error() != 0) {
	// XXX: ERR_GET_REASON does not return something that is
	// useful as an exit code at all.
	result->exit_code_ =
	static_cast<ExitCode>(ERR_GET_REASON(ERR_peek_error()));
	result->early_return_ = true;
	result->errors_.emplace_back("OpenSSL configuration error:\n" +
	GetOpenSSLErrorString());
	return result;

The CLI docs also describe startup loading of the default OpenSSL configuration file (openssl.cnf), which can be changed via OPENSSL_CONF or --openssl-config, but they do not provide a startup option to skip config loading entirely:
https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#openssl-shared-config

If different behavior is desired, that would likely be a Node.js behavior change request rather than an OpenSSL bug.