Adding blog post about the cloudflare redirect loop error

posts/misc/my_path_down_the_road_of_cloudflare_s_redirect_loop.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,104 @@
+.. title: My path down the road of cloudflare's redirect loop
+.. date: 2020-01-27 22:00:00
+.. slug: my_path_down_the_road_of_cloudflare_s_redirect_loop
+.. updated: 2020-01-27 22:00:00
+.. status: published
+.. tags: misc, cloudflare, cdn
+.. category: misc
+.. authors: Elia El Lazkani
+.. description: I have had issues with cloudflare's CDN causing redirect loop errors, here's how I solved it.
+.. type: text
+
+I have used **Cloudflare** as my *DNS manager* for years, specifically because it offers **API** that works with **certbot**. This setup has worked very well for me so far.
+The only thing that kept bothering me is that every time I turn on the *CDN* capability on my **Cloudflare** , I get a loor error. That's weird.
+
+.. TEASER_END
+
+Setup
+=====
+
+Let's talk about my setup for a little bit. I use **certbot** to generate and maintain my fleet of certificates.
+I use **Nginx** as a web-server.
+
+Let's say I want to host a static content off of my server. My **nginx** configuration would look something like the following.
+
+.. code:: text
+
+    server {
+        listen   443 ssl;
+        server_name  server.example.com;
+
+        ssl_certificate /path/to/the/fullchain.pem;
+        ssl_certificate_key /path/to/the/privkey.pem;
+
+        root   /path/to/data/root/;
+        index  index.html;
+
+        location / {
+                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
+        }
+    }
+
+
+This is a static site, of course. Now you may ask about *non-SSL*. Well, I don't do *non-SSL*.
+In other words, I have something like this in my config.
+
+.. code:: text
+
+    server {
+        listen 80;
+        server_name _;
+
+        location / {
+            return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
+        }
+    }
+
+
+So, all *http* traffic gets redirected to *https*.
+
+
+Problem
+=======
+
+Considering the regular setup above, once I enable the "proxy" feature of **Cloudflare** I get the following error.
+
+.. thumbnail:: /images/my_path_down_the_road_of_cloudflare_s_redirect_loop/too_many_redirects.png
+    :align: center
+    :alt: Too Many Redirects Error
+
+
+That baffled me for a bit. There is no reason for this to happen. I decided to dig deeper.
+
+
+Solution
+========
+
+As I was digging through the **Cloudflare** configuration, I stumbled upon this page.
+
+
+.. thumbnail:: /images/my_path_down_the_road_of_cloudflare_s_redirect_loop/flexible_encryption.png
+    :align: center
+    :alt: Flexible Encryption
+
+
+This is interesting. It says that the connection is encrypted between the broswer and **Cloudflare**.
+Does that mean that between **Cloudflare** and my server, the connection is unencrypted ?
+
+If that's the case, it means that the request coming from **Cloudflare** to my server is coming on *http*.
+If it is coming on *http*, it is getting redirected to *https* which goes back to **Cloudflare** and so on.
+
+::
+
+   THIS IS IT ! I FOUND MY ANSWER...
+
+
+Alright, let's move this to what they call "Full Encryption", which calls my server on *https* as it should.
+
+
+.. thumbnail:: /images/my_path_down_the_road_of_cloudflare_s_redirect_loop/full_encryption.png
+    :align: center
+    :alt: Full Encryption
+
+
+After this change, all the errors cleared up and got my blog up and running again.