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The Good Parts of AWS: Cutting Through the Clutter

HTTPS: Make the Application Speak HTTPS

Discover how to migrate an AWS application from HTTP to HTTPS by configuring your EC2 instance to use self-signed certificates. Learn to update application code, manage infrastructure changes, and safely remove HTTP endpoints to ensure secure, uninterrupted service for users.

We'll cover the following...

Objective

  • Migrate our endpoint from HTTP to HTTPS.

Steps

  • Make the application speak HTTPS.
  • Remove the HTTP endpoint.

Making our application speak HTTPS

Let’s update our application to listen to HTTPS requests on port 8443. We’re going to make the application use the self-signed certificate that the EC2 instance generated in the UserData script when it came online.

Node.js
const { hostname } = require('os');
const http = require('http');
const https = require('https'); 
const fs = require('fs');
const STACK_NAME = process.env.STACK_NAME || "Unknown Stack";
const port = 8080;
const httpsPort = 8443; 
const httpsKey = '../keys/key.pem' 
const httpsCert = '../keys/cert.pem' 
if (fs.existsSync(httpsKey) && fs.existsSync(httpsCert)) { 
  console.log('Starting https server')
  const message = `Hello HTTPS World from ${hostname()} in ${STACK_NAME}\n`;
  const options = { key: fs.readFileSync(httpsKey), cert: fs.readFileSync(httpsCert) };
  const server = https.createServer(options, (req, res) => { 
    res.statusCode = 200;
    res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain');
    res.end(message);
  });
  server.listen(httpsPort, hostname, () => {
    console.log(`Server running at http://${hostname()}:${httpsPort}/`);
  });
}
console.log('Starting http server')
const message = `Hello HTTP World from ${hostname()} in ${STACK_NAME}\n`;
const server = http.createServer((req, res) => { 
  res.statusCode = 200;
  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain');
  res.end(message);
});
server.listen(port, hostname, () => {
  console.log(`Server running at http://${hostname()}:${port}/`);
});

Line #3: Import the https node library.

Line #8: We’ll use 8443 as our local HTTPS port number.

Line #9 and #10: Path to the key and certificate ...