forcing http to go to https

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

At 08:30 PM 6/24/2004, Steven Stern wrote:
>I've worked around all of it by deleting all the webmail virtualhosts and PHP
>redirects and putting this at the start of the VirtualHosts list:

Allow me to suggest a different approach, and one which has been working on 
my server for a while now.

<VirtualHost *>
     ServerName     www.domain.com
     ServerAdmin    webmaster at domain.com
     DocumentRoot   /var/www/domain

     RewriteEngine  on
     RewriteCond    %{SERVER_PORT}  !^443$
     RewriteRule    ^/(.*)          https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [L,R,NC]
</VirtualHost>

What this does is act on any connection which does not come in on port 443. 
That part is obvious. The neat thing is that it then takes everything in 
the URL after the first slash with the (.*) and remembers it as $1. By 
"after the first slash" I mean after the slash at the end of 
http://www.domain.com/ <-- that last slash. So everything after that slash, 
that is the internal URL, is memorized. The URL is then rewritten as 
https://www.domain.com/$1 where "www.domain.com" came from the SERVER_NAME 
httpd variable and $1 is the internal URL as memorized earlier. I don't 
remember what the L,R,NC do... read the httpd docs! <grin>

Result: *any* page on your site will then be immediately and forcibly 
redirected to the very same URL but over the secure connection. Works 
*beautifully*.


-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com