AWS ALB redirect to https

Question

My Apache servers are behind an ALB/ELB. I'm terminating SSL at the load balancer. The load balancer listens on both 80 and 443. I want to redirect all http requests to https.

I have this rewrite rule in place in the vhost config:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} =http
RewriteRule .* https://%{HTTP:Host}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=permanent]

This works, but the issue is that I also have redirects in an htaccess file. When a redirect happens through the htaccess file, it redirects to http first and then the vhost config redirect picks it up and redirects to https. I want to eliminate the extra http redirect.

http://mysite.example.com/sub 301 https://mysite.example.com/sub 301 http://mysite.example.com/newsub - this redirect is htaccess 301 https://mysite.example.com/newsub 200

I'd like to gracefully get around having the htaccess redirect to http first. I can get around this by adding https://%{HTTP:Host} to rewrite rules. Is this the best way to do this:

RewriteRule ^sub$ https://%{HTTP:Host}/newsub [R=301,L]

Answer 1

Application Load Balancer now supports two new actions: redirect and fixed-response. You can configure these actions as part of the content-based routing rules, enabling you to offload this functionality to the load balancer. This simplifies deployments while benefiting from the scale, the availability, and the reliability of Elastic Load Balancing.

Here's what I did to make it work on AWS:

Example configuration for ALB redirection - HTTP -> HTTPS

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/07/elastic-load-balancing-announces-support-for-redirects-and-fixed-responses-for-application-load-balancer/