Too Many Redirect with SSL in NGINX and Jetty Server

Recently I faced a very nasty problem.

I am using Nginx as my web server and Java Web Application as App Server hosted in Jetty.

I was required to host all the pages using SSL i.e. HTTPS. I enabled Nginx to handle the HTTPS requests at the port 443. Nginx did handle the https requests however Jetty server received all the HTTPS requests as HTTP. There I had the logic to redirect all HTTP to HTTPS. So I fell into the problem that it was redirecting again and again, therefore causing Too Many Redirect error.

I had to spent a lot of time and finally I found the error and hence solution.

While the problem was HTTPS scheme was getting lost at load balancer. This could be solved using the following snippet into the web.xml

  <context-param>
    <param-name>org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.SessionPath</param-name>
    <param-value>/</param-value>
  </context-param>

  <filter>
    <filter-name>XForwardedFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>fr.xebia.servlet.filter.XForwardedFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
      <param-name>protocolHeader</param-name>
      <param-value>x-forwarded-proto</param-value>
    </init-param>
  </filter>

  <filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>XForwardedFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>
  </filter-mapping>

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