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Mathias Bynens
Asked: 2016-01-06 07:31:06 +0800 CST

How to make Apache’s mod_rewrite redirect over HTTPS by default?

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Let’s say I have a website that is available over HTTPS, e.g. https://example.com/foo. Consider the following .htaccess:

RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^foo$ bar [R=301,L]

Now, when I visit https://example.com/foo, it redirects to http://example.com/bar, over HTTP instead of HTTPS.

How can I make it go to HTTPS other than using the full scheme + host for every RewriteRule with the R flag? That is, this would do what I’m after:

RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^foo$ https://example.com/bar [R=301,L]

However, my .htaccess file contains many such RewriteRules, and it feels like there should be a way to tell Apache/mod_rewrite “rewrite to https:// by default”. What I’m really looking for is a directive to tell Apache the site is using HTTPS, similar to how one can declare the host name through ServerName foo.ext. Is that possible?

I guess this is a similar question on Stack Overflow: How to convince Apache of the original client protocol

apache-2.2

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    ServerName accepts a scheme as well, e.g. ServerName https://example.com. Changing this in the configuration and restarting Apache did the trick.

    From the documentation:

    Sometimes, the server runs behind a device that processes SSL, such as a reverse proxy, load balancer or SSL offload appliance. When this is the case, specify the https:// scheme and the port number to which the clients connect in the ServerName directive to make sure that the server generates the correct self-referential URLs.

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  2. This is a way to do it:

    RewriteEngine On

#redirect all your http trafic to https exept /foo & /bar
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(/foo|/bar)
RewriteRule (.*) https://example.com$1 [R=301,L]

#redirect /foo trafic to /bar
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /foo
RewriteRule /foo(.*) http://example.com/bar$1 [R=301,L]

    Put this into your httpd.conf, or before all your virtual host, and it will be applied to all requests starting with example.com (www.example.com will not be redirected)

    To apply the rule to all domains, you can remove the line RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com

    For information, you should avoid .htaccess usage if possible, to prevent useless hard disk access.

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  3. Is there any reason you are not using the plain Rewrite directive?

    Rewrite / https://example.com/

    For sub domains, you can do

    Rewrite http://foo.example.com https://foo.example.com
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