Make Flask's url_for use the 'https' scheme in an AWS load balancer without messing with SSLify

Question

I\'ve recently added a SSL certificate to my webapp. It\'s deployed on Amazon Web Services uses load balancers. The load balancers work as reverse proxies, handling external

Answer 1

Digging around Flask source code, I found out that url_for uses the Flask._request_ctx_stack.top.url_adapter when there is a request context.

The url_adapter.scheme defines the scheme used. To make the _scheme parameter work, url_for will swap the url_adapter.scheme temporarily and then set it back before the function returns.

(this behavior has been discussed on github as to whether it should be the previous value or PREFERRED_URL_SCHEME)

Basically, what I did was set url_adapter.scheme to https with a before_request handler. This way doesn't mess with the request itself, only with the thing generating the urls.

def _force_https():
    # my local dev is set on debug, but on AWS it's not (obviously)
    # I don't need HTTPS on local, change this to whatever condition you want.
    if not app.debug: 
        from flask import _request_ctx_stack
        if _request_ctx_stack is not None:
            reqctx = _request_ctx_stack.top
            reqctx.url_adapter.url_scheme = 'https'

app.before_request(_force_https)