Running Rails Application on https with pound

Hours ago, I posted about, “How to deploy rails application with pound as a Balancer”.

Lets run rails application on https with pound. For that your machine should have:

* Pound installed with ssl support
* Pound and mongrels running

Now, First of all we need a ssl certificate, that can be generate by issuing “openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout mydomain.pem -out mydomain.pem -days 365 -nodes” . Give all the information it asks. Now copy mydomain.pem to /etc/pound/ directory(I am assuming that your pound.cfg file resides in /etc/pound/). Now put the following code in pound configuration file(/etc/pound/pound.cfg):

ListenHTTPS
  Address 0.0.0.0
  Port    443
  Cert    "/etc/pound/mydomain.pem"
  # pass along https hint
  AddHeader "X-Forwarded-Proto: https"
  HeadRemove "X-Forwarded-Proto"

Service
    URL "/(images|stylesheets|javascripts)/"
    BackEnd
        Address 127.0.0.1
        Port    8080
    End
    Session
        Type    BASIC
        TTL     300
    End

End

  Service
    BackEnd
      Address 127.0.0.1
      Port    8000
    End
    BackEnd
      Address 127.0.0.1
      Port    8001
    End
    BackEnd
      Address 127.0.0.1
      Port    8002
    End
  End
End

I am assuming that your mongrels are running at ports 8000, 8001, 8002, apache running at 8080 and pound is listening ports 443 & 80.
Restart pound, and you are done. With this configuration all requests for dynamic content at port 443(https) will get redirected to mongrels and requests for static content will get redirected to apache.

You may want to check if the request is https or not before serving the content. That can be done by adding a before_filter (defined below) in application.rb :

def confirm_ssl
  unless request.ssl?
    request.env["HTTPS"] = "on"
    redirect_to "/"
    return
  end
end

By adding this method as before_filter in application.rb your application will check for https, if the request is not of type https it will redirect to an https request.