Question

We have purchased Verisign SSL for a Domain for https://www.domainname.com ; the problem is that it does not work for https://domainname.com. I am using ssl_requirement Gem: https://github.com/rails/ssl_requirement

So I patched the Gem to also redirect non www ones to https://www.domainname.com and it worked well for the following scenarios:

http://www.domainname.com => https://www.domainname.com
http://domainname.com => https://www.domainname.com

But not for the scenario where someone types:

https://domainname.com

It seems that the server throws error before Rails takes control. Here are the details of the server:

OS: RHEL 5.5
Ruby: 1.9.2
Rails: 3.0.10 (on RVM)
Web Server: Apache with Passenger

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Here’s the code I use to redirect from domainname.com to http://www.domainname.com

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domainname.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domainname.com/$1 [R=301,nc]

This goes in the .htaccess file at the root level of the www directory.

Here’s another writeup about SSL in Rails 3.1:
http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/2011/05/configuring-rails-3-https-ssl/