How can I redirect all HTTP traffic to the HTTPS website?

Just setup SSL on one of my sites. Attempted to use .htaccess to redirect all incoming traffic to https://, but when attempting to access the website, it gives me the "Could not open page, too many redirects." error.

.htaccess code:


What should/can I do to redirect all traffic to the https:// page?

So i can think of 3 ways

1) Use cPanel for Apache redirection

2)

3) Add redirection as variable

any help?

If you want to do it via .htaccess you could do something like this:

Just wondering, what would be the most friendly way of doing redirections as i just use cPanel or just add some code to do what i want. but just wondering if there is any extra advantage of using .HTa files?

When you do anything with CPanel with regards to redirection, that is typically what it does for you is create htaccess files or modifies the httpd.conf configuration file directly. You just have more control with doing exactly what you want when using htaccess files as CPanel is limited on exactly what you can do. For example, the above part that I wrote is not possible I believe by changing any settings in CPanel.

Can you explain what each step is doing in the code? I'm not very familiar with using .htaccess, and want to have an understanding of what I'm implementing.

Line 1 is a comment obviously

Line 2 is starting an if statement. It is saying if the server port is 80 or if https is not on (line 3), then do the rewrite rule below. As you may or may not know HTTPS on a website is typically always with port 443. Non secure pages are typically port 80. So by default when you don't specify a port in your URL, HTTP is always 80 and HTTPS is always 443. So with the above htaccess file I am saying if it is port 80 or if the environmental variable HTTPS is not on, then go forward. The reason I check for both is sometimes that environmental variable is not set on some server configurations from my understanding, and it is possible the other variable isn't set on other's so by just using both you increase chances. You could test which one works for your server and just use one if you wanted.

Line 4 is the rewrite rule. This rewrite rule just rewrites everything, but is only executed if the conditionals above pass. Since it is in parenthesis, then the entire path is stored in $1 and I can use it to make sure whatever URL they request on the HTTP side is forwarded to the same on the https side. So for instance if they went to:

http://www.domain.com/a-specific-page-12345.html

then it would redirect exactly to:

https://www.domain.com/a-specific-page-12345.html

Hope that helps

Bows Down to WebMaster lol

good info as all ways, i guess i should start writing these manually.

Ok, so by using (.*) and $1, your grabbing the entire path, checking it against the conditions, then passing everything after your trailing / to $1? So using your example:

I attempt to access the following:
http://www.domain.com/a-specific-page-12345.html

The script checks for https:// or to see if your connecting on 443, if your not, it sends 'a-specific-page-12345.html' to $1, making it https://www.domain.com/a-specific-page-12345.html?

Or is it storing the entire URL http://www.domain.com/a-specific-page-12345.html, checking to see if the conditions are true, if they aren't then appending http:// to https://?

Thanks for the info!

That one would be correct

Awesome, thanks for the info.