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Cloudflare
- CNAME Flattening
- HTTP Proxy

Cloudflare¶

Note

Setting up Cloudflare is optional and not a SymfonyCloud requirement.

CNAME Flattening¶

One of the main features that a DNS provider needs to have in order to work well with SymfonyCloud is what is usually known as “CNAME Flattening”. This solves the problem of being able to point your APEX (the “root domain”: example.com) to a domain name using a CNAME record rather than an IP address (A record). This post from Cloudflare explains this process in details.

In order to correctly point the DNS records to a SymfonyCloud project, you need the master environment CNAME; get it via symfony domain:cname.

HTTP Proxy¶

In addition to their DNS service, Cloudflare also provides an HTTP proxy with CDN, caching, TLS termination, and DDoS protection for free.

Full SSL¶

When enabling the HTTP proxy feature, we highly recommend using the “Full SSL” option from Cloudflare and not the “Flexible SSL”.

# Cloudflare's Flexible SSL option
           HTTPS                       HTTP
User <---------------> Cloudflare <-------------> SymfonyCloud

# Cloudflare's Full SSL option
           HTTPS                       HTTPS
User <---------------> Cloudflare <-------------> SymfonyCloud

It means that the traffic between Cloudflare’s servers and your SymfonyCloud project is encrypted. Without this configuration, the communication between Cloudflare and SymfonyCloud is subject to Man-in-the-middle attacks. Not using “Full SSL” can also cause infinite redirect loops as HTTPS traffic will be seen as HTTP only to your project.

Full (strict) SSL¶

For enhanced security, we recommend you to enable “Full (strict) SSL” option on your Cloudflare admin. This option ensures your website has a valid certificate installed, preventing Man-in-the-middle attacks between Cloudflare and SymfonyCloud.

First, create and download a Cloudflare Origin Certificate. Then upload it to SymfonyCloud:

$ symfony domain:update --cert=certificate-file.pem --key=private-key.key example.com

Finally, you can turn on the “Full (strict) SSL” option.

Authenticated Origin Pulls¶

Caution

This configuration is not compatible with development environments. You will have to apply this change only to the main branch or disable it for each new environment created.

By default, Cloudflare sits between end-users and a project on SymfonyCloud, but SymfonyCloud still allows direct requests to the project (by-passing Cloudflare’s features and protection). This is why we recommend you to enable Authenticated Origin Pulls.

With this features enabled, every requests reaching the application is authenticated using TLS Client-authentication, where the client certificate is signed by a known authority which allows to restrict the requests only to Cloudflare edge servers.

To enabled this setup, follow these steps:

Turn on “Authenticated Origin Pulls” in the “Crypto” section of the Cloudflare backend;
Make sure the project has the “HTTP Proxy” feature enabled (orange cloud) in the “DNS” section of the Cloudflare backend;
Download the Cloudflare Authenticated Origin Pulls CA certificate origin-pull-ca.pem and add it to the .symfony directory of the project to protect;

Adapt the .symfony/routes.yaml file as follows:

"https://{all}/":
    type: upstream
    upstream: "app:http"
    tls:
        client_authentication: "require"
        client_certificate_authorities:
            - !include
                type: string
                path: origin-pull-ca.pem

git add .symfony/origin-pull-ca.pem .symfony/routes.yaml && git commit;
symfony deploy

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.