django-sslify

Do you want to force HTTPs across your Django site? You're in the right place!

Purpose

Enabling SSL on your Django site should be easy, easy as in one-line-of-code easy. That's why I wrote django-sslify!

The goal of this project is to make it easy for people to force HTTPS on every page of their Django site, API, web app, or whatever you're building. Securing your site shouldn't be hard.

Using Django 1.8 or later?

This package was written before Django 1.8. If you are using Django 1.8 or later, you do not need this library in order to force HTTPS. Instead, you can just change your settings.py file to include SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT.

# in settings.py
SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT = True

If you are using Heroku, you may need to add SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER as well.

# in settings.py
SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT = True
SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO', 'https')

Django's documentation includes more details about security settings for HTTPS.

If you are using an older version of Django (1.7 or earlier), then this package is for you.

Installation

To install django-sslify, simply run:

$ pip install django-sslify

This will install the latest version of the library automatically.

If you're using Heroku, you should add django-sslify>=0.2 to your requirements.txt file:

$ echo 'django-sslify>=0.2.0' >> requirements.txt

Once you've done this, the next time you push your code to Heroku this library will be installed for you automatically.

Usage

To use this library, and force SSL across your Django site, all you need to do is modify your settings.py file, and prepend sslify.middleware.SSLifyMiddleware to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting:

# settings.py

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'sslify.middleware.SSLifyMiddleware',
    # ...
)

Note

Make sure sslify.middleware.SSLifyMiddleware is the first middleware class listed, as this will ensure that if a user makes an insecure request (over HTTP), they will be redirected to HTTPs before any actual processing happens.

If you're using Heroku, you should also add the following settings to your Django settings file:

SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO', 'https')

This ensures that Django will be able to detect a secure connection properly.

Using a Custom SSL Port

If your site is running on a non-standard SSL port, you can change django-sslify's default redirection behavior by setting a special variable in your settings.py file:

SSLIFY_PORT = 999

Disabling SSLify

If you'd like to disable SSLify in certain environments (for local development, or running unit tests), the best way to do it is to modify your settings file and add the following:

SSLIFY_DISABLE = True

You can also disable SSLify for certain requests only (useful for exposing HTTP-only web hook URLs, etc) by adding a callable with a single request parameter to the SSLIFY_DISABLE_FOR_REQUEST list. Returning True from your callable will disable SSL redirects.

SSLIFY_DISABLE_FOR_REQUEST = [
    lambda request: request.get_full_path().startswith('/no_ssl_please')
]

Notes

This code was initially taken from this StackOverflow thread.

This code has been adopted over the years to work on Heroku, and non-Heroku platforms.

If you're using Heroku, and have no idea how to setup SSL, read this great article which talks about using the new SSL endpoint addon (which totally rocks!).

NGINX + Infinite Redirect

If you're running your Django app behind an Nginx load balancer, and are seeing infinite redirects, the solution is to add the following line:

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

To your nginx.conf file, inside of the relevant location blocks. This Stack Overflow thread might also be useful.

Contributing

This project is only possible due to the amazing contributors who work on it!

If you'd like to improve this library, please send me a pull request! I'm happy to review and merge pull requests.

The standard contribution workflow should look something like this:

Fork this project on Github.
Make some changes in the master branch (this project is simple, so no need to complicate things).
Send a pull request when ready.

Also, if you're making changes, please write tests for your changes -- this project has a full test suite you can easily modify / test.

To run the test suite, you can use the following commands:

$ cd django-sslify
$ python setup.py develop
$ python manage.py test sslify

Change Log

All library changes, in descending order.

Version 0.2.5

Released December 28, 2014.

Adding in new SSLIFY_DISABLE_FOR_REQUEST setting which allows a user to specify functions that can choose to reject SSL -- this is useful for situations where you might want to force SSL site-wide EXCEPT in a few circumstances (webhooks that don't support SSL, for instance).