The increasing adoption of HTTPS as the default connection protocol for websites has introduced a few new challenges to developers and system administrators, such as the need to consolidate a canonical domain by redirecting non-HTTP sites to HTTPS, in addition to redirecting www to non-www host name (or vice-versa).

1. Http To Https Apache 2.4
2. Apache Https Setup

The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards. Step 2: Redirect Apache2 HTTP to HTTPS. Our post above set up Apache2 to communicate over both HTTP and HTTPS however, in today’s environment, it’s recommended to choose one type of protocol and redirect the other to it. Even after restart, my apache server was not listening on 443 (and would only serve on 80), even though everything was correct. I had to enable the SSL module, then everything worked perfectly. In the tutorial, we have to put in terminal “sudo a2ensite ssl”, for mine to work, I also had to run “sudo a2enmod ssl”.

Introduction

Here I show how to redirect a site from www to non-www (or viceversa) and from HTTP to HTTPS, using the Apache server configuration. To be more clear, the configuration will redirect the following host names:

to

I'll also show a small change to redirect the non-www to the www version, if you prefer the www.

Apache Configuration

To configure the redirects, add the following redirect rule either to the Apache config file if you have access to it, or to the .htaccess in the root of your site:

If instead of example.com you want the default URL to be www.example.com, then simply change the third and the fifth lines:

How it works

Since I'm not a huge fan of cut-and-paste tutorials, let's try to understand how the configuration works. That would help you to make the necessary modifications, if needed.

The first line enables the Apache runtime rewriting engine, required to perform the redirect. You may have already enabled it in a previous config in the same file. If that's the case, you can skip that line.

These two lines are are the redirect conditions, they are used to determine if the request should be redirected. Because the conditions are joined with an [OR], if any of those two conditions returns true, Apache will execute the rewrite rule (the redirect).

The first condition determines if the request is using a non-HTTPS URL. The second condition determines if the request is using the www URL. Notice that I used www. and not www., because the pattern is a regular expression and the . dot has a special meaning here, hence it must be escaped.

The forth line is a convenient line I used to avoid referending the hostname directly in the URL. It matches the HOST of the incoming request, and decomposes it into www part (if any), and rest of the hostname. We'll reference it later with %1 in the RewriteRule.

If you know the host name in advance, you may improve the rule by inlining the URL and skipping this condition (see later).

The RewriteRule is the heart of the redirect. With this line we tell Apache to redirect any request to a new URL, composed by:

• https://www.
• %1: the reference to the non-www part of the host
• %{REQUEST_URI}: the URI of the request, without the hostname

All these tokens are joined together, and represents the final redirect URI. Finally, we append 3 flags:

• NE to not escape special characters
• R=301 to use the HTTP 301 redirect status
• L to stop processing other rules, and redirect immediately

Remarks

As I've already mentioned, my example uses an extra RewriteCond line to extract the host name, and avoid to inline the hostname in the rule. If you feel this is a performance penalty for you, you can inline the host directly in the rule:

Conclusion

This articles provides a simple configuration to redirect www and non-HTTPS requests to the canonical site domain. This is very useful to avoid content duplication issues with search engines, and offer an improved experience to your users.

If you search online there are dozens of ways to perform a redirect in Apache, this is just one of the possibilities and it may not cover all the possible cases. Hopefully, with the explanation in the How it works section you will be able to customize it to your needs.

Skip to end of metadataGo to start of metadata

HTTP to HTTPS

Scenario :

You want to force people coming to your site to use HTTPS. Either for the entire site or a small sub-section of it.

• Note*

Using mod_rewrite to do this isn't the recommended behavior. See RedirectSSL

Fix :

Entire site (.htaccess) :

Note: While the rules you need are the same as above (because the rule above doesn't depend on any of the quirks of rewrite in .htaccess), you will need to ensure that you place this in a .htaccess file in the root of the site you want to apply it against, and to make sure you have the appropriate AllowOverride configuration in your httpd.conf

Http To Https Apache 2.4

Specific Directory

Apache Https Setup

Either put the above solution in a .htaccess file in the directory to be affected, or put the URI prefix in the regex itself.