Rails - How to Redirect from http://example.com to https://www.example.com

Question

I'm looking to learn how to cleanup my app's URLs. My app is powered by Rails 3 on Heroku.

The desired URL is https://www.example.comite.com

I'd like to redirect all URLs unlike the above to that URL. Is this a Rails thing or DNS?

Bad URLs:

https://example.comite.com http://www.example.comite.com http://example.comite.com 

And if anything is trailing, like http://www.example.comite.com/photo/1 for the url to be redirected with the path: https://www.example.comite.com/photo/1

Answer 1

DNS records cannot define the protocol for a domain, therefore you can't redirect http:// to https:// through DNS. Doing it through the web server configuration is not portable, hard to do, error prone and just plain outdated. This is a job best handled by the Rails router.

# beginning of routes.rb  match "*path" => redirect("https://www.mysite.com/%{path}"), :constraints => { :protocol => "http://" } match "*path" => redirect("https://www.mysite.com/%{path}"), :constraints => { :subdomain => "" } 

Answer 2

As an extension to user2100689's answer, in Rails 3+ you can use config.force_ssl = true in config/environments/production.rb

The line can just be uncommented as follows

# Force all access to the app over SSL, use Strict-Transport-Security, and use secure cookies. config.force_ssl = true