How to redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS

Question

I'm trying to redirect all insecure HTTP requests on my site (e.g. http://www.example.com) to HTTPS (https://www.example.com). I'm using PHP btw. Can I do this in .htaccess?

Answer 1

The Apache docs recommend against using a rewrite:

To redirect http URLs to https, do the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.example.com
    Redirect / https://www.example.com/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName www.example.com
    # ... SSL configuration goes here
</VirtualHost>

This snippet should go into main server configuration file, not into .htaccess as asked in the question.

This article might have come up only after the question was asked and answered, but seems to be the current way to go.