Question

I’m using django-socialregistration on Apache. I started getting this error message.

Invalid OpenID Namespace u'http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0'

Answer 1

It starts with a rewrite rule in my Apache configuration file.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName foobar.org
  ServerAlias foobar.net
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://foobar.org$1 [R=301,L]
</VirtualHost>

So any request that comes in to foobar.net or doesn’t come over https gets redirected to https://foobar.org. When Apache does this redirect, by default, it escapes the url. See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/flags.html#flag_ne

So one solution is to just do this:

  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://foobar.org$1 [R=301,L,NE]

But why is the redirect happening in the first place? In my case, it’s because django-socialregistration checks a setting to determine whether or not to use ssl in the OpenID workflow. I watched my runserver and saw something like

GET /openid/redirect/?openid_provider=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Faccounts%2Fo8%2Fid&next=%2Faccounts%2Fnext%2F%3Fnext%3Dundefined

I curl -v <that_url>, and saw that the Location header (that is, the redirect url) contained something like this:

...openid.return_to=http%3A%2F%2Ffoobar.org%2Fopeni...

Notice that it isn’t using https. I dug through django-socialregistration and saw that I need this in settings.py:

SOCIALREGISTRATION_USE_HTTPS = True