Setting Up Ghost with Nginx as a Reverse Proxy and SSL

When I installed Ghost on my server and configured Nginx as the reverse proxy server, I also set up SSL in Nginx. Additionally, I updated the URL for the website in Ghost's configuration file to https://blog.y9i.cc. However, I encountered an issue where I couldn't access the URL.

The Issue

When I tried to visit localhost:2368 on the server, it attempted to redirect to https://localhost:2368. The output was as follows:

$ curl localhost:2368
Moved Permanently. Redirecting to https://localhost:2368/

Conversely, when I configured the URL as http://blog.y9i.cc, I could access the website via https://blog.y9i.cc. However, updating the theme in Ghost caused the preview page to fail to display. Inspecting the network tab in Chrome's developer tools revealed that the page was being loaded from http://blog.y9i.cc.

Investigation

To solve this problem, I delved into Ghost's source code and discovered that it enforces a redirect to SSL when the website is configured to use an HTTPS link. The relevant code is located in the file /current/core/server/web/shared/middleware/url-redirects.js:

/**
 * Takes care of
 *
 * 1. required SSL redirects
 */
_private.getFrontendRedirectUrl = ({requestedHost, requestedUrl, queryParameters, secure}) => {
    const siteUrl = urlUtils.urlFor('home', true);

    debug('getFrontendRedirectUrl', requestedHost, requestedUrl, siteUrl);

    // CASE: configured canonical url is HTTPS, but request is HTTP, redirect to requested host + SSL
    if (urlUtils.isSSL(siteUrl) && !secure) {
        debug('redirect because protocol does not match');
        return _private.redirectUrl({
            redirectTo: `https://${requestedHost}`,
            pathname: requestedUrl,
            query: queryParameters
        });
    }
};

Solution

The solution to the problem was to modify the function to return null, bypassing the SSL redirect. The updated function is as follows:

_private.getFrontendRedirectUrl = ({requestedHost, requestedUrl, queryParameters, secure}) => {
    return null;
};

After making this change, the admin page displayed correctly, and the theme preview issue was resolved.