Facebook Canvas App developing without SSL

Question

Facebook recently changed the security settings on Account Configs, now there is no more an option to force, or not, an application to use HTTPS protocol.

Therefore, it isn't possible to do a App without a SSL key. Previously we could just don't fill Secure Canvas URL field, and access the canvas app through the HTTP protocol. But now, without the option in the security user config, the facebook app keeps redirecting to the HTTPS protocol.

So, there is some workaround for this ?

Answer 1

As CBroe says, you need SSL.

There are 2 things you need in my opinion:

A webserver with SSL.

IF you're in OSX and you run Apache, this tutorial really helps: http://blog.andyhunt.info/2011/11/26/apache-ssl-on-max-osx-lion-10-7/, plus you might want to add your certificate as a trusted (root?) certificate, or certificate authority. (I'm not very well versed in this) The only caveat I found, specially for Chrome, is that when you're generating the Certificate Request File, under Common Name place "localhost" or the host you're using for development. This last caveat should be similar in Windows, since it's a browser requirement that the certificate common name matches the actual host. Browsers like Firefox allows you to permanently trust a certificate, thus avoiding all the certificate installation on the OS and trusting.

A proxy app

proxy-like app to act as a man in the middle and decode the encrypted information, in order to see the actual requests and response being sent and received from the server. There should be other software, but the one I use and love is Charles Proxy, which can do this and tons more.

Hope it helps!