Can't access server since switching to https on aws

Question

I am deploying a MERN stack using EC2 on AWS.

I have created SSL certificates for the following domains:

example.com
*.example.com
www.example.com

The cname and cvalue for example.com and *.example.com are identical but they are different for www.example.com

I have set up target groups and a load balancer and edited the listener to redirect from http to https.

I have set up 3 different records in the hosted zone of route 53 so that www.example.com, *.example.com and example.com are directed to the loadbalancer

I can load https://example.com

http://example.com directs to https://example.com

When the website loads (either by typing http or https) it does not connect to the server.

I am getting the following error in the console:

Mixed Content: The page at 'https://example.com/' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure XMLHttpRequest endpoint 'http://54.220.212.131:5000/events'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.

54.220.212.131 is the site's IP and 5000 is the server's port. This is hard coded in the front end.

How should I get the client to send requests to the server for a https connection?

Answer 1

It sounds like you have two services running, a front-end service that you have correctly configured to run behind a load balancer, and a back-end service that you are connecting directly to via the server's IP address on port 5000.

Your backend on port 5000 is not secure, and that is exactly what the web browser's error is telling you. You need to configure all your services to run behind the load balancer. You need to create a second target group that sends traffic to port 5000 on your server, and setup a routing rule on the load balancer's listener to send all traffic for api.ticketglen.com to that target group. Then you need to change your hard-coded values in from http://54.220.221.131:5000 to https://api.ticketglen.com.

Answer 2

What worked for me was to create the SSL certificates from the server and delete them and the load balancer altogether from the AWS platform.

Process is outlined here