Drupal behind a SSL offloading reverse proxy -- is this config correct?

Question

We are transitioning an existing drupal installation to run as a SSL-only site behind a SSL offloading proxy. Drupal itself has no SSL and is running on port 80 on apache.

We've got what we think is a pretty successful configuration:

On the nginx end of the world it looks like:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         staging.example.com;
    return              301 https://staging.example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen                  443 ssl;
    server_name             staging.example.com;
    ssl_certificate         $chained_cert_path
    ssl_certificate_key     $private_key_path;

    location / {
        proxy_pass          http://$backend_ip;
        proxy_set_header    Host $host;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-By $server_addr:$server_port;
        proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_redirect      http:// https://;
    }
}

And in the drupal site's config we are running:

// reverse proxy settings and such
$conf['reverse_proxy'] = TRUE;
$conf['reverse_proxy_addresses'] = array($proxy_ip);
$base_url = 'https://staging.example.com';

As I said this seems to be passing all tests, but my spidey sense is saying this was too easy and there is a fugly problem waiting somewhere in some part of drupal we don't understand well enough -- manually paving $base_url just isn't sitting right with me. Are there landmines here?

Answer 1

You don't have to indicate $base_url = 'https://staging.example.com'; , you can have something like this:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         staging.example.com;
    return              301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen                  443 ssl;
    server_name             staging.example.com;
    ssl_certificate         $chained_cert_path
    ssl_certificate_key     $private_key_path;

    location / {
        proxy_pass          http://$backend_ip;
        proxy_set_header    Host $host;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    }
}

and in your Drupal settings:

$conf['reverse_proxy'] = TRUE;
$conf['reverse_proxy_addresses'] = array($proxy_ip);

// from http://devblog.more-onion.com/using-drupal-behind-reverse-proxy
if (
  isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO']) &&
  $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'] == 'https' &&
  !empty($conf['reverse_proxy']) &&
  in_array($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], $conf['reverse_proxy_addresses'])
) {
  $_SERVER['HTTPS'] = 'on';
  // This is hardcoded because there is no header specifying the original port.
  $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] = 443;
}