UPDATE 2017-07-08: With WordPress introducing secure cookies, it is no longer possible to put the code in functions.php. Read below.
CloudFlare recently rolled out UniversalSSL to all customers, including free. This allows all CloudFlare customers to have a secure connection between their websites and their visitors (well, not entirely, but lets not go into that now). I personally just installed UniversalSSL on my blog, and everything was fine until I cleared my cache.
No stylesheets were loading.
By default, all webbrowsers block attempts to get HTTP resources over a HTTPS connection. The easiest solution for this is protocol-agnostic URL:s and they work really well.
BUT
WordPress by default does NOT apply protocol-agnostic URL:s to its generated links (such as from wp_head()
), which causes issues when using a reverse proxy with SSL such as CloudFlare (this also applies to HAProxy, nginx and others). Because SSL terminates at the reverse-proxy, the actual webserver receives as normal HTTP request. WordPress constructs its generated URLs based on what type of request is coming to the webserver itself, and therefore creates normal http://
-prefixed URLs that get blocked when they are loaded by the client that connected via HTTPS.
The internal request between the reverse-proxy and the webserver also causes issues if you wish to set the “Site Url” in your WordPress settings to the https://
-prefixed link. Because EVERY request between these two are plain HTTP, WordPress will in turn attempt to redirect the user to https://
, and cause a redirect loop.
The solution
To solve this, we use information provided (hopefully!) by the reverse proxy that tells us which protocol was used. If HTTPS was the case, we fool WordPress that the current connection is HTTPS.
The magic lines to do this is as follows:
if(isset($_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO"]) && $_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO"] == "https") { $_SERVER["HTTPS"] = "on"; }
Simply put it in your theme’s functions.php file or in any other file that is executed Because WordPress has introduced secure cookies that have a different name than regular cookies, it is no longer possible to put the code in your theme’s functions.php. It must be declared in your wp-config.php. …before any URLs are printed, and it should generate https://-prefixed urls!