PHP Environment reporting port 80 on https application.

Question

I have a secure (https) application set up in the Webfaction portal running on 443 (of course) in PHP.

My forum software was insisting the port was 80 and causing me no end of headaches. Took an hour to track it down, but it turns out PHP's environment is reporting port 80:

$envSnip = array();
$envBits = array('HTTPS', 'HTTP_HTTPS', 'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO',
          'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SSL', 'SERVER_ADDR', 'SERVER_PORT');
foreach ($envBits as $bit) {
    $envSnip[$bit] = $_SERVER[$bit];
}
echo "<pre>";print_r($envSnip);die();

Array
(
    [HTTPS] => on
    [HTTP_HTTPS] => on
    [HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO] => https
    [HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SSL] => on
    [SERVER_ADDR] => 127.0.0.1
    [SERVER_PORT] => 80
)

This is rather unexpected. I've patched over the problem by manually forcing the port to 443, but I'm curious as to why the environment is claiming to be port 80. Is this some simple configuration I've completely missed?

Accepted Answer

That's correct. PHP always runs on port 80, regardless of whether your site uses HTTP or HTTPS. To understand why, you need to understand a bit about WebFaction's infrastructure:

1) All requests (HTTP and HTTPS) arrive at the web server's "frontend" Nginx "reverse proxy" daemon. This frontend server/daemon is responsible for forwarding requests based on domain name ("virtual hosting"), and it also performs all the dirty work of HTTPS encryption and decryption. By the time the connection is forwarded to your app, SSL has already been stripped off, so all internal connections are always HTTP.

2) PHP is served by an internal Apache server/daemon, which runs on port 80. So this is why your PHP always reports port 80.

If you want to detect whether a request originally came in on HTTP or HTTPS, you can check these request headers:

Http-X-Forwarded-Proto
Https
X-Forwarded-Proto
X-Forwarded-SSL

...Some other useful headers that get set by the reverse-proxy:

X-Forwarded-Host
X-Forwarded-Server
X-Forwarded-For
Forwarded-Request-Uri

Regards,

~Christopher S, WebFaction Support

PHP Environment reporting port 80 on https application.

Follow this question

Related questions