can node HTTPS server be created without public and private keys? - node.js

Question

I am using expressjs to create an http/https server.
There was a case wherein the server was not able to fetch the public and private certificate files from a directory.
In which case I create the server using http and send a raw HTML file to the client indicating that there was an issue, but here lies the problem,
the user does not know that they need to move to http url rather than https to see the HTML file.
So is there a way I can redirect my users to a https url when they try to access the http URL
init.js
try {
// options = get public and private certificate file
} catch(e) {
// accessError
}
if(accessError) {
server = http.createServer();
} else {
server = https.createServer(options, (req, res) => {
res.writeHead(200);
res.end('hello world\n');
});
);
}
server.listen(8080);
app.js
let app = require('express');
app.use((req, res, next) => {
if(accessError) {
res.sendFile(index.html);
} else {
next();
}
});
index.html
<h1> there was an error <h1>

Answer 1

You can try a 301 Redirect like in the answer to this question.
Whenever somebody tries to access the http variant of a resource, they'll be redirected to the https one.
As a design decision I'd treat the inability to retrieve certificates as a fatal error. I imagine you're reading them at start time. If you can't read them for some reason, you should just terminate the application, and log an exception. You do need to have some monitoring in place to notice that the thing hasn't started and act accordingly when you can't find it. But displaying an error page seems like more trouble than it's worth. You're going to have the application in an up state, but not really. Cause it won't be able to do anything, and you'll need to rely on clients telling you that it doesn't work and there's a https related message etc. Better to fail hard.