Apache virtual host redirect http to https

Question

I know that this question has been asked and answered many times. However I can't seem to get it working for my scenario.

I want to redirect all http traffic to https and redirect the https root to a login page. Here are my virtual hosts in the vhost.conf file.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www
    ServerName sub-domain.mydomain.com
    ServerAdmin admin@example.com
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/http_access.log common
    LOGFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\"" combined
    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/http_error.log
    TransferLog /var/log/httpd/http_transfer.log

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
    RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1
    #Redirect permanent / https://%{HTTP_HOST}%/login/mylogin.jsp (Not used as I need to use a rewrite rule rather than redirect only the root)
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
    DocumentRoot /var/www
    ServerName sub-domain.mydomain.com
    ServerAdmin admin@example.com
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/https_access.log common
    LOGFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\"" combined
    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/https_error.log
    TransferLog /var/log/httpd/https_transfer.log

    SSLEngine on
    SSLOptions +StrictRequire
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/httpd/conf/mydomain.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/httpd/conf/mydomain.key
    SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/httpd/conf/intermediate.crt

    # HSTS (mod_headers is required) (15768000 seconds = 6 months)- ref https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generator/
    Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15768000"

    JkMount .....  

    <FilesMatch "\.(cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$">
        SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
    </FilesMatch>

    <Directory "/var/www/cgi-bin">
        SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
        SSLRequireSSL
    </Directory>

    BrowserMatch "MSIE [2-5]" \
    nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
    downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

    AddDefaultCharset utf-8
    AddType image/svg+xml svg svgz
    AddEncoding gzip svgz

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteRule ^/$ /login/mylogin.jsp [R=permanent,L]
</VirtualHost>

The https root to login redirect works fine. However I am unable to get the http to https redirect working. I have tried various recommendations like;

RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}
RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1
RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/%$1

as per the various posts here. But Some of them don't work and on some of the recommendations there were comments mentioning that query strings don't work with the %{REQUEST_URI} variable.

I need a good solution which will redirect all http traffic to https while retaining the rest of the request url. For example.

http://sub-domain.mydomain.com to https://sub-domain.mydomain.com

http://sub-domain.mydomain.com/somepage.html to https://sub-domain.mydomain.com/somepage.html

http://sub-domain.mydomain.com/thepage.html?day=tuesday&month=march to https://sub-domain.mydomain.com/thepage.html?day=tuesday&month=march

I will make the redirect permanent once I have tested and am satisfied with the redirect working as expected.

I don't want to use htaccess please.

Answer 1

You have already taken care of the specific redirection from "/" to "/login/mylogin.jsp", so it should work. For redirecting all the http traffic to HTTPS, you can use RedirectMatch.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www
    ServerName sub-domain.mydomain.com
    ServerAdmin admin@example.com
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/http_access.log common
    LOGFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\"" combined
    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/http_error.log
    TransferLog /var/log/httpd/http_transfer.log

    RedirectMatch permanent ^/(.*)$ https://sub-domain.mydomain.com/$1

</VirtualHost>