Hacker News Reader

It's true that this is a problem if you insist on serving your CDN assets a custom domain CNAME mapped to CloudFront (i.e. https://assets.mydomain.com/). It doesn't cost extra if you just use the default CloudFront distribution URL, i.e. https://d3vam04na8c92l.cloudfront.net/stylesheets/applicatio...

This is not entirely clear from the Heroku docs, I'll ping the maintainer for an update.

View on HN

One cool trick for serving mixed http/https that I somehow went 10 years without finding out: you can just point your Rails asset_host to "//d3vam04na8c92l.cloudfront.net". Browsers understand this to mean "Look up this address via whatever protocol I am currently on, http if http, https if over SSL."

This is a huge cache boost in Rails because you don't have to cache your pages twice (once for HTTP once for HTTPs.)

Oh god.. While your post is cool, I reacted violently to the "One cool trick..." part at the beginning.

Upworthy, you've broken me.

Is there any real downside to this approach, or is it just that it looks "less professional"?

No, you're still serving the same assets. It's only really an issue if your users like seeing where network requests are going and spot the cloudfront URL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com