Redirect Jekyll Site To HTTPS On OpenShift

I’m preparing to roll out a new Jekyll website, but unlike with my other Jekyll sites, I want each web page served up on https, not http. This means telling the server to redirect http request to https.

Hosting this new site on Github Pages isn’t option because Github Pages doesn’t support using a custom SSL certificate for your custom domain name. So I decided to see what it would take to host a Jekyll site on OpenShift.

I was thrilled to learn that OpenShift has a quick start cartridge for installing Jekyll on a new gear. With a click of a button I was able to deploy my new server instance with a boiler plate Jekyll site. I replaced the boiler plate site with the one I’ve been working on, and BAM! My site was up and running. The only step remaining was to force the web server to serve up the pages using https.

Turns out this is simple to do with OpenShift and Jekyll. First, I went over to namecheap.com and purchased a RapidSSL certificate with domain validation. Next, I followed the instructions from OpenShift to generate my certificate signing request. Using my newly generated CSR I activated my RapidSSL certificate over at namecheap, then I followed the instructions on OpenShift to add the certificate to my server instance.

Up to this point everything was easy peasy, and all I had left to do was figure out how to redirect the Jekyll site from http to https. Turns out this isn’t difficult either.

The Jekyll website is actually just a static website hosted by Apache 2 running on an OpenShift gear. To force the redirect all I needed to do was add a .htaccess file to the root of my Jekyll site source code (note: the site source code is in the source/ directory when using OpenShift) and put this rewrite rule in the file:

RewriteEngine on  
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https  
RewriteRule .* https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]  

After I added the .htaccess file with the rewrite rule, I pushed my changes to the remote git repository running on my OpenShift gear. This launched Jekyll which re-built my static website, this time with each web page being served with https instead of http.

Including the .htaccess file works great when deploying the Jekyll site to OpenShift, but approach isn’t unique to OpenShift. This should work for most Jekyll site hosted with Apache 2. And if for some reason Jekyll isn’t including the .htaccess file when it builds the site, add include: [".htaccess"] to your _config.yaml file.

Posted in programming. Tagged in jekyll, web.

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