Forcing HTTPS when using opsworks nginx and ELB to terminate SSL

Question

Using Opsworks standard setup/recipes for a Rails app served via Unicorn/nginx layer. SSL is terminated at the Elastic Load Balancer - so traffic to the rails app from ELB is always http. So far so good. I would like to have any request to http://domain.com to be redirected to https://domain.com

ELB has two listeners - one with port 80, and one 443.

I know that if I were running my own nginx I could setup a redirect rule... However, i want to stay within the opsworks way of doing things if possible.

Answer 1

I think the only way to do this in OpsWorks is to create a custom recipe that modifies /etc/nginx/sites-available/#{application}. In your custom cookbook:

somecookbook/recipes/nginx.rb

node[:deploy].each do |application, deploy| 

      service "nginx" do
        supports :status => true
        action :nothing
      end

      # Add HTTP => HTTPS redirect      
      template "/tmp/http_redirect.conf" do
        source "nginx/http_redirect.conf.erb"
      end

      execute "redirect HTTP to HTTPS" do
        cwd "/etc/nginx/sites-available"
        command "cat #{application} /tmp/http_redirect.conf > /tmp/#{application}.conf && cat /tmp/#{application}.conf > #{application}"
        notifies :restart, "service[nginx]", :immediately
      end                                      
  end    
end

Then in the config:

somecookbook/templates/default/nginx/http_redirect.conf.erb

server {
    listen       80;
    rewrite ^(.*) https://$host$1 permanent;
}