Automatic HTTPS connection/redirect with node.js/express

Question

Ryan, thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I fleshed out your answer (2nd paragraph) a little bit with some code and it works. In this scenario these code snippets are put in my express app:

// set up plain http server
var http = express();

// set up a route to redirect http to https
http.get('*', function(req, res) {  
    res.redirect('https://' + req.headers.host + req.url);

    // Or, if you don't want to automatically detect the domain name from the request header, you can hard code it:
    // res.redirect('https://example.com' + req.url);
})

// have it listen on 8080
http.listen(8080);

The https express server listens ATM on 3000. I set up these iptables rules so that node doesn't have to run as root:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000

All together, this works exactly as I wanted it to.

To prevent theft of cookies over HTTP, see this answer (from the comments) or use this code:

const session = require('cookie-session');
app.use(
  session({
    secret: "some secret",
    httpOnly: true,  // Don't let browser javascript access cookies.
    secure: true, // Only use cookies over https.
  })
);

Thanks to this guy: https://www.tonyerwin.com/2014/09/redirecting-http-to-https-with-nodejs.html

If secure, requests via https, otherwise redirects to https

app.enable('trust proxy')
app.use((req, res, next) => {
    req.secure ? next() : res.redirect('https://' + req.headers.host + req.url)
})

If you follow conventional ports since HTTP tries port 80 by default and HTTPS tries port 443 by default you can simply have two server's on the same machine: Here's the code:

var https = require('https');

var fs = require('fs');
var options = {
    key: fs.readFileSync('./key.pem'),
    cert: fs.readFileSync('./cert.pem')
};

https.createServer(options, function (req, res) {
    res.end('secure!');
}).listen(443);

// Redirect from http port 80 to https
var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
    res.writeHead(301, { "Location": "https://" + req.headers['host'] + req.url });
    res.end();
}).listen(80);

Test with https:

$ curl https://127.0.0.1 -k
secure!

With http:

$ curl http://127.0.0.1 -i
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://127.0.0.1/
Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 06:15:16 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

More details : Nodejs HTTP and HTTPS over same port

With Nginx you can take advantage of the "x-forwarded-proto" header:

function ensureSec(req, res, next){
    if (req.headers["x-forwarded-proto"] === "https"){
       return next();
    }
    res.redirect("https://" + req.headers.host + req.url);  
}

As of 0.4.12 we have no real clean way of listening for HTTP & HTTPS on the same port using Node's HTTP/HTTPS servers.

Some people have solved this issue by having having Node's HTTPS server (this works with Express.js as well) listen to 443 (or some other port) and also have a small http server bind to 80 and redirect users to the secure port.

If you absolutely have to be able to handle both protocols on a single port then you need to put nginx, lighttpd, apache, or some other web server on that port and have act as a reverse proxy for Node.