Localhost SSL connection error

Hey mr.clayton,

I’m experiencing exactly the same issue – spent the last 3 hours trying to debug/research it. Seems to have something to do with Chrome v44.0.x

I found these other tidbits of info about it, but nothing official from Chrome yet – not saying it’s not out there, but have not found anything from them yet. Am submitting an issue to them as I write this. Here are the articles I’ve found so far. You could also try the HSTS issue which is pretty well documented but for me this was not the case, my localhost domain returned no results in HSTS.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31561729/chrome-keeps-redirecting-me-to-https
https://superuser.com/questions/943862/sites-redirecting-to-https

Kind Regards

Thanks for the reply @spongsta. Yes, I believe you are right. Chrome is the culprit because the header value “HTTP_HTTPS” is not being sent for Firefox, IE, or Safari.

I tried the HSTS as well but this was not the case.

Some things I have tried:
the function is_ssl() is called around the admin.php include. I commented out this function but the occasional $url variable still points towards https. I manually changed every url in the debugger but css, and js is still being loaded over https.

Short of commenting out every piece of code that searches the $_SERVER[‘HTTPS’], I am at a loss for a solution. I believe the behavior can be traced back to the $_SERVER[‘HTTPS’].

I’m also noticing strange behavior in my production site. The dreaded redirect loop has appeared.

Have you tried setting
SSLEngine off
in your VirtualHost entry? I haven’t tried this yet, will do when I get home on my personal Macbook Pro. But work Macbook Pro seems to be OK with this and Chrome 44.0.x. Only real difference I can see at this point is that my personal machine is on latest OSX and work machine on OSX 10.9.5

I really wish I brought mine to work now haha. Ah well, thems the breaks. Odd though that this would need to be set in a *:80 VirtualHost. *:80 VH entries have been just fine in the past without one.

Since I am developing on my local machine (laptop) I am not familiar with maintaining the SSLEngine off setting. Would that still be applicable for someone running MAMP and wordpress on their laptop?

I’ll be very interested to see what happens once you make that change!

@spongsta are you using woocommerce by chance? If so, it’s a version incompatibility between woocommerce 2.3.12 and chrome. In vesion 2.3.12 there is a function fix_server_vars that appears to force HTTP_HTTPS which causes chrome to lose it. It will also lead to the redirect loop that wordpress is so notorious for.

Upgrading to woocommerce 2.3.13 should resolve it for you.

Hey mr.clayton,

I’ll have to try the woocommerce update a bit later but I did read about that today, did it work for you? SSLEngine off did not resolve the issue. But yes, with MAMP you should still be able to edit the VirtualHost files. But if you’re not too experienced with that then I wouldn’t worry too much since like you mentioned this appears to be an issue with the woocommerce version.

Cheers for the assistance! WP community to the rescue!

Kind Regards

Yep, it worked like a charm. That’s a good lesson for me to always keep my plugins updated.