Stuart Henderson writes:

> On 2021/04/27 10:40, Vincent Lee wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Consider the following situation. A reverse proxy which performs TLS
>> termination is deployed in front of httpd, which listens unencrypted on 
>> localhost.
>>
>> There is code in httpd to handle the case where a directory is accessed,
>> but the path named does not end with a slash. In this case, httpd
>> issues a 301 redirect to the path with a slash appended.
>> The logic here sets the protocol of the redirect path based on
>> whether the httpd virtual server is configured with TLS, but this isn't
>> enough because it will cause redirects to plain http when there is a
>> reverse proxy in front of httpd that performs TLS termination.
>> This will either cause an extra redirect round trip to get back to HTTPS,
>> or break the site if it's not publicly served on plain HTTP.
>>
>> Instead, we should be reading X-Forwarded-Proto, which most reverse proxies
>> add to inform the backing server what the original protocol was.
>> (relayd doesn't expose this to my knowledge, but I will look into doing so)
>>
>> The below attached diff does this for httpd. This is my first diff to the
>> project, so please give feedback on whether I've done everything right.
>
> How does this work with other web servers? For example, I don't see the
> string X-Forwarded-Proto in nginx or Apache httpd (and the use of other
> X-Forwarded headers in them are only for adding to requests when running
> as a proxy itself, or picking up the client IP from headers rather than
> TCP).

I concur in what you're seeing in other codebases.

On the proxy side, what I'm finding is any support for X-Forwarded-Proto
is runtime config and effectively manual intervention by whomever is
configuring the proxy.

For Nginx, it seems they have an "autoindex" feature, but don't account
for X-Forwarded-Proto like in the proposed diff.

What nginx *does* support is disabling absolute redirects changing the
way the Location header gets constructed in the redirect. (See [1].)
Maybe that makes more sense as a feature in httpd(8)? It should achieve
the correct end result. (Maybe it's already possible? Need to check.)

-dv

[1] https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#absolute_redirect

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