For many users who are working with self-signed certs, ssl verification can be troublesome. I found that while I could use python-gitlab with our internal certs, I can't do it from a configuration file.

For instance, this works:

gitlab_dao = gitlab.Gitlab('https://our.gitlab.location', private_token='somethingprivate', ssl_verify='/our/companys/internal/certs/cert.crt')

But when I tried to set up a config file like

[global]
default = https://our.gitlab.location
ssl_verify = /our/companys/internal/certs/cert.crt
timeout = 5
api_version = 3

[somewhere]
url = https://our.gitlab.location
private_token = somethingprivate

And call it with gitlab_dao = gitlab.Gitlab.from_config('somewhere', ['my-config.cfg']), it would break on gitlab_dao.auth().

Some debugging led me to the reason: GitlabConfigParser line 66: self.ssl_verify = self._config.getboolean(self.gitlab_id, 'ssl_verify')

Because it's only looking for a boolean, it throws an exception here and sets ssl_verify to True. This kills the internal cert.