Rack::SslEnforcer is a simple Rack middleware to enforce SSL connections. As of Version 0.2.0, Rack::SslEnforcer marks Cookies as secure by default (HSTS must be set manually).
Tested against Ruby 1.8.7, 1.9.2, 1.9.3, ruby-head, REE and the latest versions of Rubinius & JRuby.
The simplest way to install Rack::SslEnforcer is to use Bundler.
Add Rack::SslEnforcer to your Gemfile:
gem 'rack-ssl-enforcer'If you don't use Bundler, be sure to require Rack::SslEnforcer manually before actually using the middleware:
require 'rack/ssl-enforcer'
use Rack::SslEnforcerTo use Rack::SslEnforcer in your Rails application, add the following line to your application config file (config/application.rb for Rails 3, config/environment.rb for Rails 2):
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcerIf all you want is SSL for your whole application, you are done! Otherwise, you can specify some options described below.
You can enforce SSL connections only for certain hosts with :only_hosts, or prevent certain hosts from being forced to SSL with :except_hosts. Constraints can be a String, a Regex or an array of String or Regex (possibly mixed), as shown in the following examples:
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :only_hosts => 'api.example.com'
# Please note that, for instance, both http://help.example.com/demo and https://help.example.com/demo would be accessible here
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :except_hosts => /[help|blog]\.example\.com$/
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :only_hosts => [/[secure|admin]\.example\.org$/, 'api.example.com']You can enforce SSL connections only for certain paths with :only, or prevent certain paths from being forced to SSL with :except. Constraints can be a String, a Regex or an array of String or Regex (possibly mixed), as shown in the following examples:
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :only => '/login'
# Please note that, for instance, both http://example.com/demo and https://example.com/demo would be accessible here
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :only => %r{^/admin/}
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :except => ['/demo', %r{^/public/}]You can enforce SSL connections only for certain HTTP methods with :only_methods, or prevent certain HTTP methods from being forced to SSL with :except_methods. Constraints can be a String or an array of String, as shown in the following examples:
# constraint as a String
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :only_methods => 'POST'
# Please note that, for instance, GET requests would be accessible via SSL and non-SSL connection here
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :except_methods => ['GET', 'HEAD']Note: The :hosts constraint takes precedence over the :path constraint. Please see the tests for examples.
Use the :strict option to force non-SSL connection for all requests not matching the constraints you set. Examples:
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :only => ["/login", /\.xml$/], :strict => true
# https://example.com/demo would be redirected to http://example.com/demo
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :except_hosts => 'demo.example.com', :strict => true
# https://demo.example.com would be redirected to http://demo.example.comIn the case where you have matching URLs with different HTTP methods – for instance Rails RESTful routes: GET /users, POST /users, GET /user/:id and PUT /user/:id – you may need to force POST and PUT requests to SSL connection but redirect to non-SSL connection on GET.
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :only => [%r{^/users/}], :mixed => trueThe above will allow you to POST/PUT from the secure/non-secure URLs keeping the original schema.
To set HSTS expiry and subdomain inclusion (defaults respectively to one year and true).
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :hsts => { :expires => 500, :subdomains => false }
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :hsts => true # equivalent to { :expires => 31536000, :subdomains => true }Please note that the strict option disables HSTS.
You might need the :redirect_to option if the requested URL can't be determined.
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :redirect_to => 'https://example.org'If you're using a different port than the default (80) for HTTP, you can specify it with the :http_port option:
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :http_port => 8080If you're using a different port than the default (443) for HTTPS, you can specify it with the :https_port option:
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :https_port => 444Finally you might want to share a cookie based session between HTTP and HTTPS. This is not possible by default with Rack::SslEnforcer for security reasons.
Nevertheless, you can set the :force_secure_cookies option to false in order to be able to share a cookie based session between HTTP and HTTPS:
config.middleware.use Rack::SslEnforcer, :only => "/login", :force_secure_cookies => falseBut be aware that if you do so, you have to make sure that the content of you cookie is encoded. This can be done using a coder with Rack::Session::Cookie.
If you run your application behind a proxy (e.g. Nginx) you may need to do some configuration on that side. If you don't you may experience an infinite redirect loop.
The reason this happens is that Rack::SslEnforcer can't detect if you are running SSL or not. The solution is to have your front-end server send extra headers for Rack::SslEnforcer to identify the request protocol.
In the location block for your app's SSL configuration, include the following proxy header configuration:
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
This makes sure that Rack::SslEnforcer knows it's being accessed over SSL. Just restart Nginx for these changes to take effect.
- Cleanup tests
Flagging cookies as secure functionality and HSTS support is greatly inspired by Joshua Peek's Rack::SSL.
- Fork the project.
- Code your feature addition or bug fix.
- Add tests for it. This is important so we don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
- Commit, do not mess with Rakefile or version number. If you want to have your own version, that's fine but bump version in a commit by itself so we can ignore it when merging.
- Send a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.
Copyright (c) 2010-2012 Tobias Matthies. See LICENSE for details.