SSL Redirection with Rails 3.0.10 from non-www to www and http to https

Question

We have purchased Verisign SSL for a Domain for https://www.domainname.com ; the problem is that it does not work for https://domainname.com . I am using ssl_requirement Gem: https://github.com/rails/ssl_requirement

So I patched the Gem to also redirect non www ones to https://www.domainname.com and it worked well for the following scenarios:

http://www.domainname.com => https://www.domainname.com http://domainname.com => https://www.domainname.com

But not for the scenario where someone types:

https://domainname.com

It seems that the server throws error before Rails takes control. Here are the details of the server:

OS: RHEL 5.5 Ruby: 1.9.2 Rails: 3.0.10 (on RVM) Web Server: Apache with Passenger

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Here's the code I use to redirect from domainname.com to www.domainname.com

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domainname.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domainname.com/$1 [R=301,nc]

This goes in the .htaccess file at the root level of the www directory.

Here's another writeup about SSL in Rails 3.1: http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/2011/05/configuring-rails-3-https-ssl/

Answer 2

You will prob have to handle this at apache level using a .htaccess file in the public dir of your rails app.

for the www rewrite rule see this SO answer: use htaccess to add www with https support

Also if your going to ssl your whole app have a look at Rack::SSL middleware - it handles secure cookies and such. This post has a good write up on using it and also avoiding mixed content warnings.

http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2010/11/29/ssl-with-rails/

Hope this helps.

NOTE: Just got to thinking, this may not work still, if it doesn't you may have to setup a specific VirtualHost to handle that scenario, hopefully not.

Answer 3

I've found the rack-rewrite gem to be particularly helpful here, particularly since Heroku doesn't use .htaccess. Gem: https://github.com/jtrupiano/rack-rewrite

Here's an example configuration in config/environments/production.rb

ExampleApp::Application.configure do
  config.middleware.insert_before(Rack::Lock, Rack::Rewrite) do
    r301 /.*/, Proc.new {|path, rack_env| "http://www.#{rack_env['SERVER_NAME']}#{path}" }, :if => Proc.new {|rack_env| rack_env['SERVER_NAME'] !~ /www\./i}
   end
   #... the rest of production environment config.
 end

Check it out as my gist at: https://gist.github.com/1843097