TL;DR: * HTTP -> HTTPS redirection is live (finally!) * Currently allowing a "POST loophole" * "POST loophole" will be closed on 2021-02-01

Today we merged a small change [0] to the front proxy used by Cloud VPS projects [1]. This change brings automatic HTTP -> HTTPS redirection to the "domain proxy" service and a Strict-Transport-Security header with a 1 day duration.

The current configuration is conservative. We will only redirect GET and HEAD requests to HTTPS to avoid triggering bugs in the handling of redirects during POST requests. This "POST loophole" is the same process that we followed when converting the production wiki farm and Toolforge to HTTPS.

When we announced similar changes for Toolforge in 2019 [2] we forgot to set a timeline for closing the POST loophole. This time we are wiser! We will close the POST loophole and make all HTTP requests, regardless of the verb used, redirect to HTTPS on 2021-02-01. This 6 month transition period should give us all a chance to find and update URLs to use https and to fix any dependent software that might break if a redirect was sent for a POST request.

If you find issues in your projects resulting from this change, please do let us know. The tracking task for this change is T120486 [3]. We also provide support in the #wikimedia-cloud channel on Freenode and via the cloud@lists.wikimedia.org mailing list [4].

[0]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/puppet/+/620122/ [1]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_a_web_proxy_to_reach_Cloud_VP... [2]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/132/migrating_tools.wmflab... [3]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120486 [4]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/cloud

Bryan, on behalf of the Cloud VPS admin team