Django Invalid HTTP_HOST header: '<ip>'. You may need to add '<ip>' to ALLOWED_HOSTS

Question

<ip> is showing an actual ip address, I just didn't include it in the title. I believe this ip address is the internal ip of my EC2 instance. I'm using AWS Elastic beanstalk to host.

I see this question has been answered a lot on SO, and the answer is always to add the ip address to the ALLOWED_HOSTS, but in my case I've set ALLOWED_HOSTS=['*'] and I'm still getting the error.

The weird thing is, I'm only getting the error when I try to access the site from my phone. When I access from the desktop browser, it works fine...

Things I've tried:

1. I've double checked my elastic beanstalk deployment and the changes are definitely deployed.

Answer 1

Ok so this probably won't be the answer for other people but it was for me.. In my case, I was doing an http GET request from my frontend and forgot the extra "/" at the end of the url. My django urls.py defines the url with a slash at the end. My fix was to add the extra "/" when doing the http GET.

On my desktop, this was automatically handled because django would reply with an automatic redirect (302) and my desktop browser would go to the url with / at the end, but my phone was not doing the redirect!

This somehow was throwing the invalid HTTP_HOST header error.

For most people, the fix for an error message like this is to add all of your domains to the list of ALLOWED_HOSTS.

Oh and if you're using elasticbeanstalk like me, don't forget to add the AWS domain name. It should look something like this:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['<your-unique-id>.elasticbeanstalk.com', 'example.com', '<your-subdomain>.example.com']

DON'T do ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*'] in prod!!