Flask url_for generating http URL instead of https

With Flask 0.10, there will be a much better solution available than wrapping url_for. If you look at https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/commit/b5069d07a24a3c3a54fb056aa6f4076a0e7088c7, a _scheme parameter has been added. Which means you can do the following:

url_for('secure_thingy',
        _external=True,
        _scheme='https',
        viewarg1=1, ...)

_scheme sets the URL scheme, generating a URL like https://.. instead of http://. However, by default Flask only generates paths (without host or scheme), so you will need to include the _external=True to go from /secure_thingy to https://example.com/secure_thingy.

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However, consider making your website HTTPS-only instead. It seems that you're trying to partially enforce HTTPS for only a few "secure" routes, but you can't ensure that your https-URL is not changed if the page linking to the secure page is not encrypted. This is similar to mixed content.

If you want to affect the URL scheme for all server-generated URLs (url_for and redirect), rather than having to set _scheme on every call, it seems that the "correct" answer is to use WSGI middleware, as in this snippet: http://flask.pocoo.org/snippets/35/

(This Flask bug seems to confirm that that is the preferred way.)

Basically, if your WSGI environment has environ['wsgi.url_scheme'] = 'https', then url_for will generate https: URLs.

I was getting http:// URLs from url_for because my server was deployed behind an Elastic Beanstalk load balancer, which communicates with the server in regular HTTP. My solution (specific to Elastic Beanstalk) was like this (simplified from the snippet linked above):

class ReverseProxied(object):
    def __init__(self, app):
        self.app = app

    def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
        scheme = environ.get('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO')
        if scheme:
            environ['wsgi.url_scheme'] = scheme
        return self.app(environ, start_response)

app = Flask(__name__)
app.wsgi_app = ReverseProxied(app.wsgi_app)

The Elastic Beanstalk-specific part of that is HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO. Other environments would have other ways of determining whether the external URL included https. If you just want to always use HTTPS, you could unconditionally set environ['wsgi.url_scheme'] = 'https'.

PREFERRED_URL_SCHEME is not the way to do this. It's ignored whenever a request is in progress.