Configuring HTTPS and Subdomain on GCP and configure NGINX HTTP redirection to HTTPS

4 min readJun 4, 2020

Introduction

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products

Configure GCP

So on GCP, I have 1 VM that contain 2 applications,

Web UI application, using nginx that expose port 80
API application, using nginx that expose port 8085

Then I have 1 domain name, e.g : hendisuhardja.com. Now I want to configure the VM to use the domain. Let’s say Web UI application will have domain hendisuhardja.com and API application will use subdomain api.hendisuhardja.com. We could do it easily on GCP and we could use Google Certificate to set HTTPS too

Below are the steps :

Set Web UI Load Balancing

Open GCP (https://console.cloud.google.com/) then login
Select the project, then open Navigation Menu on Top Left of the page, navigate to Network Services -> Load Balancing
Then on Load balancing page, click “Create Load Balancer”

Choose HTTP(S) Load Balancing

Choose From Internet to my VMs

On Backend configuration section, choose Backend services -> Create a backend service

Set Protocol as “HTTP”, Named port “http-ui” (Note : please make sure you use different named port for each load balancing, because if you use same name, it will overwrite the others), choose your instance group, choose your application exposed port, in my case it is 80

On Host and path rules, configure as below

On Frontend configuration section, Set Protocol as “HTTPS” and IP version to “IPv4” then on IP address choose “Create IP address” (Ephemeral IP Address is not static, so don’t use this because you need to map static IP address to domain)

On “Select a certificate, choose “Create a new certificate”

Give name of your certificate, on create mode choose “Create Google-managed certificate” , for domains, fill with your domain name, in my case “hendisuhardja.com”. Then click Create

After you make load balancing, navigate to Network services -> Cloud DNS, choose Zone type “Public”, DNS Name fill with your domain name, in my case “hendisuhardja.com”, then click Create

Make sure you have Type NS and A. On Resource Record Type “A”, fill the IP Address

Set API Load Balancing

Steps are similar when you create Web UI Load Balancing, the different are below

On Backend configuration, set Named port to different name with Web UI Named port. e.g : http-api, then set port number to your API exposed port number, e.g : 8085

On Create certificate, on domains field, fill with sub domain “api.hendisuhardja.com”.

Then on Cloud DNS, create new record set, fill DNS Name with “api”. Then Resource Record Type “A”, then set your IP Address with IP Address from API Load Balancing

NGINX Configuration for HTTP Redirection to HTTPS

For NGINX file, you could use below configuration to redirect http request to https, e.g : when user navigate to http://hendisuhardja.com, it will redirect to https://hendisuhardja.com with below configuration

http {
    server {
      listen 80;     if ($http_x_forwarded_proto = "http") {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
     }
     location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
     }
   }
}

Thanks for reading