Httpd Redirect To Secure Content

Internal

• httpd Configuration#Subjects

Overview

It is sometimes desirable to serve the content of a web site over HTTPS but not over HTTP. However, it is nice to provide a redirect service for the entire HTTP site, so the users are automatically redirected to the secure site when they try to access the unsecured content. One way of implementing this is presented below.

Procedure

Declare two virtual sites, one secure and one unsecure, under the same ServerName.

Details on how to configure virtual hosts are available here: httpd Virtual Host Configuration

Details on how to secure a site with SSL are available here: httpd SSL Configuration

    ...

    <VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName praetorian.novaordis.com
        Redirect / https://praetorian.novaordis.com/
    </VirtualHost >

    <VirtualHost *:443>
        ServerName praetorian.novaordis.com
        # SSL configuration
    </VirtualHost >

   ...

Note

Make sure the httpd process listens on both ports (80 and 443).

More details about Redirect are available here Redirect.