Django - links generated with {% url %} - how to make them secure?

Question

If I want to give an option for users to log in to a website using https:// instead of http://, I'd best to give them an option to get there in my view or template.

I'd like to have the link "Use secure connection" on my login page - but then, how do I do it without hardcoding the URL?

I'd like to be able to just do:

{% url login_page %}
{% url login_page_https %} 

and have them point to http://example.com/login and https://example.com/login.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

The {% url %} tag only generates the path portion of the URL, not the host portion. It only generates something like "/path/to/here" (all you need to do is "view source" and you'll see that's the entire contents of the href). It's your browser that assumes if you're currently on http://example.com the link should also be within http://example.com. So all you need to do to generate a secure link in your template is:

<a href="https://example.com{% url blah %}">

If you don't want to hardcode the domain name (and I wouldn't), you can use the Site object and have it look something like:

<a href="https://{{ site.domain }}{% url blah %}">

Or if you don't want to use the sites framework, you can use request.get_host:

<a href="https://{{ request.get_host }}{% url blah %}">