I am using Nginx as a proxy in front of a Java application (because it's hosted at Amazon where we only get one IP address per system, and I am running multiple sites).

When the application calls getRequestURL, it gets http://dev.mysite.com regardless of whether the request was actually http or https.

I am guessing that this is because Host gets set to either $host or $http_host, both of which are dev.mysite.com, and somewhere along the way an assumption gets made that that is http. I have tried setting Host to https://dev.mysite.com but that returns a completely empty page - I assume that means it's an invalid value for the Host header.

I have spent quite a bit of time researching this and I have found that Django users experience a similar problem and the fix is to add a header like X-Url-Scheme and pass along the value of $scheme, which will be https at the appropriate times. However, I don't see other Java users reporting similar problems, and the fix seems kind of kludgy to me.

Does this mean I have something configured incorrectly, or is this just the way it works? And if so is the above the best way to work around it?

Thanks in advance!