I just spent several hours debugging some code using LWP::UserAgent. The code could be reduced to this:

use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $URL = 'https://myhost.local/';

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->ssl_opts( verify_hostname => 0 );
my $response = $ua->get($URL);

if ($response->is_success) {
    print $response->decoded_content;  # or whatever
}
else {
    die $response->status_line;
}
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So pretty much a copy&paste from the LWP::UserAgent docs.

The error message I got was:

Can't connect to myhost.local:443\n\n
500 Can't connect to myhost.local:443 at foo.pl line 15.
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After some debugging, strace finally showed me an ENOENT for an SSL CA file, which nudged me into the right direction.

So, my questions are:

• Why does a missing CA file cause the request to fail, even though I've used ua->ssl_opts( verify_hostname => 0 );?
• What do I have to do to get a better error message out of LWP::UserAgent? Is this a bug in LWP::UserAgent?

This is on a Debian Jessie box with perl 5.20.2, and LWP::UserAgent 6.06.