Do you have a site that’s accelerated with varnish but noticed that there is no native SSL support for Varnish?
No problems!
You can use a bunch of different methods to terminate SSL .
In this post I’m not going to be posting a bunch of configuration or setup steps. But discuss the caveats of terminating SSL .
Let’s say you are using drupal or wordpress.
Your current setup probably looks something like this:
varnish –> apache OR nginx backend -> application (wordpress/drupal) .
With Let’s encrypt you’re going to want to setup an SSL terminator. In the past I’ve recommended using ”pound” as an SSL terminator, but due to the slow development cycles I’ve moved towards nginx or haproxy.
Of the two I’d setup nginx SSL terminator in most cases as the Let’s encrypt certbot supports nginx natively for issuing and renewing SSL certificates.
Haproxy is awesome if you plan to use multiple backends or caches. If you use haproxy you probably know what you are doing but the problem with Let’s encrypt is that you have to run certbot in standalone mode with the ”certonly” variable on the commandline .
Haproxy will be configured to pass the acme-challenge to the standalone daemon that certbot launches. The renewal process will also use the forwarded requests .
With nginx it’s as simple as just creating the cert using certbot and configuring SSL proxy onwards to varnish.
We assume that you have previously managed to configure apache mod_rpaf , mod_remoteip or nginx to handle x-forwarded-for to provide the right IP to the web application.
One big issue that we’ve seen on customer installations when adding let’s encrypt support to already running setups is the fact that the backend application has no clue about https protocol. This sometimes causes forwarding loops or problems with loading http:// resources over a https:// connection (modern webrowsers raises alerts and refuses to load resources outside the https:// connection if it’s properly configured).
It’s important that the x-forwarded-for and protocol is passed on in all steps of the chain.
With haproxy you use option forwardfor and x-forwarded-proto.
Nginx needs to do the same.
On the backend side you can force SSL in a number of different ways.
The easiest way in php is to force https. Drupal and WordPress have a number of plugins to do so, you can also edit the php config files to force SSL.
For example in wp-config.php :
define(’FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);
// in some setups HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO might contain
// a comma-separated list e.g. http,https
// so check for https existence
if (strpos($_SERVER[’HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO’], ’https’) !== false)
$_SERVER[’HTTPS’]=’on’;
Do you need help to add SSL and let’s encrypt for your current varnish setups? Feel free to contact us
Adminor also offers ready-made VM images with Let’s encrypt varnish proxies for our VPS customers.
