Redirect HTTP to HTTPS on Flask+Heroku

Question

When I attempt to redirect incoming traffic to https I get an infinite redirect loop.

@app.route('/checkout/')                                                                                                                                                                                        
def checkout():                                                                                                                                                                                                 
    checkout = "https://myapp.herokuapp.com/checkout/"                                                                                                                                              
    if checkout != request.url:                                                                                                                                                                             
        print checkout, request.url                                                                                                                                                                             
        return redirect(checkout)                                                                                                                                                                               
    return render_template('checkout.html', key=keys['publishable_key']) 

The request.url is never changed to prefix https. I want to use heroku's piggyback ssl to minimize cost.

Answer 1

On Heroku, SSL (https) is terminated before it reaches your application, so you app never actually sees SSL traffic. To check whether a request was made with https, you instead have to inspect the x-forwarded-proto header. More info here: How to make python on Heroku https only?

UPDATE: For your use, you should just check request.url for "myapp.herokuapp.com/checkout/"; and verify that the header is "https"