What's the de facto standard for a Reverse Proxy to tell the backend SSL is used?
http-headers, https, reverse-proxy
Solution
The proxy can add extra (or overwrite) headers to requests it receives and passes through to the back-end. These can be used to communicate information to the back-end.
So far I've seen a couple used for forcing the use of https in URL scheme:
X-Forwarded-Protocol: https
X-Forwarded-Ssl: on
X-Url-Scheme: https
And wikipedia also mentions:
# a de facto standard:
X-Forwarded-Proto: https
# Non-standard header used by Microsoft applications and load-balancers:
Front-End-Https: on
This what you should add to the VirtualHost on apache: other proxies should have similar functionality
RequestHeader set X-FORWARDED-PROTOCOL https
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Ssl on
# etc.
I think it's best to set them all, or set one that works and remove the other known ones. To prevent evil clients messing with them.
Problem
I have a reverse proxy that does HTTPS on the outside, but HTTP on the inside. This means that by default in-app URLs will have HTTP as the scheme, as this is the way it's being contacted. How can the proxy tell the backend that HTTPS should be used?