HTTP to HTTPS with health link on Elastic Beanstalk using Django

Question

I am trying to redirect Http to Https in Django deployed on AWS Beanstalk. Http to Https works fine when I remove the health link from the load balancer. while having link in load balancer the app stops working.

I am using the following config in settings file in the Django project hosted on Aws Beanstalk.

CORS_REPLACE_HTTPS_REFERER = True
HOST_SCHEME = "https://"
SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO', 'https')
SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT = True
SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = True
CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE = True
SECURE_HSTS_PRELOAD = True
SECURE_HSTS_INCLUDE_SUBDOMAINS = True

Answer 1

With SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT = True all non-secure requests will be redirected to https. Non-secure requests - ones done via http and with not matched SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER .

Even if your load balancer performs http to https redirect by itself - it is good to have this option enabled in django and simplier (all security options enabled).

---

AWS ALB Health Checks cannot set custom headers. We can exclude requests to certain endpoints from being redirected to https with SECURE_REDIRECT_EXEMPT - [r'^health/$'] .

---

AWS ALB Health Check requests are done to instance ip. To allow django process them - ip needs to be added to ALLOWED_HOSTS : ["172.16.2.5", "my.example.com"] . This needs to be instance private ip, one that will be used by ALB to reach it.

This can be done with:

• Adding instance ip on instance start like in example . It can also be done with custom scripts and environment variables.

• using custom middleware which allows adding ip ranges in ALLOWED_HOSTS and add VPC Subnet range or implement custom middleware manually

---

AWS ALB cannot add HSTS headers. If you want to use Strict Transport Security headers - they should be added on app django side. This can be done with setting SECURE_HSTS_SECONDS other than zero.

HSTS headers are only added on responses to secure requests ( https:// or SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER match).

Answer 2

I had the same problem and I fixed it with a middleware (python 3.x):

production settings.py:

MIDDLEWARE = ['market.middleware.ELBHealthChecker_middleware'] + MIDDLEWARE

ELB middleware:

def ELBHealthChecker_middleware(get_response):

    def middleware(request):
        response = get_response(request)
        if "ELB-HealthChecker" in request.META["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]:
            from django.http import HttpResponse
            return HttpResponse(status=200)
        return response
    return middleware

Answer 3

SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO', 'https')
SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT = True

These have worked for me in the past.