How To Configure Your Shop to Only Use HTTPS

On Hypernode we recommend serving your site only over HTTPS traffic. This is safer and is better for search index optimization.

Most of the available browsers only support HTTP/2 when your pages are served over SSL so to use this faster and newer HTTP technology, order an SSL certificate and make sure your site is only served over HTTPS.

You can find more in-depth information in this article about SSL on Hypernode.

How to Use SSL Certificates via Hypernode.com

Please check out this article for the different SSL options when you use the Hypernode Control Panel.

Order Let’s Encrypt Certificates

On Hypernodes With Hypernode Managed Vhosts Enabled

Please note: If you want to use Let’s Encrypt and have the Hypernode Managed Vhosts (HMV) system enabled, you need to configure LE during the creation of the vhost. Using the old method with dehydrated won’t work!

First, check if HMV is enabled on your Hypernode:

hypernode-systemctl settings managed_vhosts_enabled

If so, it will give the following output:

managed_vhosts_enabled is set to value True

If you want to request a LE certificate you need to add the --https flag with the HMV-command.

hypernode-manage-vhosts www.example.com --https --force-https

This command will not only request a LE Certificate but because of the –force-https flag it will also redirects all traffic for that specific vhost to HTTPS.

On Hypernodes Without Hypernode Managed Vhosts Enabled

To order Let’s Encrypt certificates for all storefronts, use the following command:

## Create an entry for each storefront
for DOMAIN in $( n98-magerun sys:store:config:base-url:list --format=csv | sed 1d | cut -d , -f 3 | perl -pe "s/https?://(www.)?//" | tr -d "/" | sort -u ); do
    echo -e "$DOMAIN www.${DOMAIN}" >> ~/.dehydrated/domains.txt
done

## Order the certificates
dehydrated -c --create-dirs

Don’t forget to add the cron to renew your certificates to the crontab if you are using Let’s Encrypt!

Changing Your Base URLs

If your SSL certificates are linked to your Hypernode, or you ordered Let’s Encrypt certificates, we can change the base URLs to use only HTTPS. To make this easier, we created a little Python script that changes all your base URLs to HTTPS:

# Download the script
wget -O change_baseurls.py https://gist.githubusercontent.com/hn-support/0c76ebb5615a5be789997db2ae40bcdd/raw/
## Execute to change the base URLs to HTTPS
python change_baseurls.py

Routing All Traffic Over SSL Using Nginx

If you configure your Magento shop to only use HTTPS, all HTTP traffic will be redirected to HTTPS.

If this is done by Magento, the database and PHP are used for making this redirect, which is expensive in resources.

This is why we must configure this in Nginx, so the redirect does not use unnecessary resources.

Run the following command to add the configuration to Nginx that routes all traffic over HTTPS:

Create the following file at /data/web/nginx/public.ssl_redirect.conf:

if ($scheme = http) {
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

Please note that if you have Hypernode Managed Vhosts enabled, you can skip this.

Check Settings of Third Party Solutions

After configuring your shop to only use HTTPS, please do not forget to check HTTP(S) settings of third party solutions to avoid problems, e.g.:

Payment providers like Adyen.
Stock providers like Picqer.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console.