## TL;DR

Please give me a hand and fix this issue. If heroku login fails on Windows with UNABLE_TO_VERIFY_LEAF_SIGNATURE, check for ESET antivirus: its SSL protection produces an invalid certificate chain for Node apps.

## Steps

1. If heroku login fails on Windows with UNABLE_TO_VERIFY_LEAF_SIGNATURE, check for ESET antivirus: its SSL protection produces an invalid certificate chain for Node apps. The reporter fixed it by uninstalling ESET; milder workarounds discussed in the thread are the ESET settings changes linked there, or running the commands inside WSL.

## When to use

You are seeing this: Issue heroku/cli#2819 (closed, 12 comments): What is the current behavior? Use this skill when you run into "Heroku login -- unable to verify the first certificate".

## When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

## Versions

Versions mentioned in the source: heroku 8.10.0, node- v16.20.2. If you are on something much newer or older, the details may have shifted.

## Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.

## Sources

- https://github.com/heroku/cli/issues/2819