"Debug certificate expired" error in Eclipse Android plugins

When installing Android SDK plugins to Eclipse, users may encounter the following error:

Debug certificate expired on 1/30/20 2:35 PM!

The date varies from user to user and is based on when their certificate expired.

Why does the error show up?

Once the Android SDK is installed, it generates a debug signing certificate in a keystore called debug.keystore. The Eclipse plugin uses this certificate to sign generated application builds. However, each debug certification has a fixed lifetime of 365 days, after which it is no longer valid. This is what causes the error.

Solution

To fix the problem, we need to generate a new debug certificate. For this to be done, the existing debug.keystore file should be deleted. Once the old certificate is deleted, the Eclipse plugin should generate a new certificate when we try to build a debug package. It would be a good idea to clean and then build the package for certificate generation.

To delete your debug certificate:

• Linux and Mac OS: delete the debug.keystore file from ~/.android/debug.keystore
• Windows: C:\Users\YourUserName\.android\debug.keystore