Redirect from HTTP to HTTPS using meta redirects

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README.md

redirect-https.js

Secure-by-default redirects from HTTP to HTTPS.

Browsers get a 301 + Location redirect
Only developers, bots, and APIs see security warning (advising to use HTTPS)
Always uses meta redirect as a fallback, for everyone
'/' always gets a 301 (for curl | bash installers)
minimally configurable, don't get fancy

See https://coolaj86.com/articles/secure-your-redirects/

Installation and Usage

npm install --save redirect-https

"use strict";

var express = require("express");
var app = express();

var redirector = require("redirect-https")({
    body: "<!-- Hello Developer! Please use HTTPS instead: {{ URL }} -->"
});

app.use("/", redirector);

module.exports = app;

Options

{ port: 443           // defaults to 443
, body: ''            // defaults to an html comment to use https
, trustProxy: true    // useful if you haven't set this option in express
, browsers: 301       // issue 301 redirect if the user-agent contains "Mozilla/"
, apis: 'meta'        // issue meta redirects to non-browsers
}

This module will call next() if the connection is already tls / https.
If trustProxy is true, and X-Forward-Proto is https, next() will be called.
{{ URL }} in the body text will be replaced with a URI encoded and HTML escaped url (it'll look just like it is)
{{ HTML_URL }} in the body text will be replaced with a URI decoded and HTML escaped url (it'll look just like it would in Chrome's URL bar)
{{ UNSAFE_URL }} is the raw, original url

Demo

"use strict";

var http = require("http");
var server = http.createServer();
var securePort = process.argv[2] || 8443;
var insecurePort = process.argv[3] || 8080;

var redirector = require("redirect-https")({
    port: securePort,
    body: "<!-- Hello! Please use HTTPS instead: {{ URL }} -->",
    trustProxy: true // default is false
});

server.on("request", redirector);

server.listen(insecurePort, function () {
    console.log(
        "Listening on http://localhost.rootprojects.org:" +
            server.address().port
    );
});

Advanced Options

For the sake of curl | bash installers and the like there is also the option to cause bots and apis (i.e. curl) to get a certain redirect for an exact path match:

{
    paths: [
        { match: "/", redirect: 301 },
        { match: /^\/$/, redirect: 301 }
    ];
}

If you're using this, you're probably getting too fancy (but hey, I get too fancy sometimes too).

Meta redirect by default, but why?

When something is broken (i.e. insecure), you don't want it to kinda work, you want developers to notice.

Using a meta redirect will break requests from curl and api calls from a programming language, but still have all the SEO and speed benefits of a normal 301.

<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL='https://example.com/foo'" />
</head><body>
<!-- Hello Mr. Developer! Please use https instead. Thank you! -->
</html>

Other strategies

If your application is properly separated between static assets and api, then it would probably be more beneficial to return a 200 OK with an error message inside

Security

The incoming URL is already URI encoded by the browser but, just in case, I run an html escape on it so that no malicious links of this sort will yield unexpected behavior:

http://localhost.rootprojects.org:8080/"><script>alert('hi')</script>
http://localhost.rootprojects.org:8080/';URL=http://example.com
http://localhost.rootprojects.org:8080/;URL=http://example.com