Redirecting EC2 Elastic Load Balancer from HTTP to

Question

I want to redirect all the HTTP request to https request on ELB. I have two EC2 instances. I am using nginx for the server. I have tried a rewriting the nginx conf files without any success. I would love some advice on it.

Answer 1

I had strange problem with nginx and ELB configuration. My setup included 3 different services inside one nginx behind ELB. And I had mixed content issue: when your request to ELB is https, but inside ELB http only, and server create relative path to static using http, so browser fails with 'mixed content' issue. And I must create solution for both http/https work without any redirects.

Here is config located in nginx/conf.d/ folder:

# Required for http/https switching
map $http_x_forwarded_port $switch {
  default   off;
  "80"    off;
  "443"   on;
}

This means that we will have knowledge what real client protocol is. As you can see, we will have it in $switch var. And at this moment you use this in all location where you need it:

location ~ /softwareapi/index.php {
  fastcgi_param HTTPS $switch;
  .. other settings here ..
}

With HTTPS setting php application will automatically detect right protocol and carefully build relative path for preventing mixed content issue.

Best regards.

Answer 2

AWS Application Load Balancers now support native HTTP to HTTPS redirect.

To enable this in the console, do the the following:

1. Go to your Load Balancer in EC2 and tab "Listeners"
2. Select "View/edit rules" on your HTTP listener
3. Delete all rules except for the default one (bottom)
4. Edit default rule: choose "Redirect to" as an action, leave everything as default and enter "443" as a port.

The same can be achieved by using the CLI as described here.

It is also possible to do this in Cloudformation, where you need to set up a Listener object like this:

  HttpListener:
    Type: AWS::ElasticLoadBalancingV2::Listener
    Properties:
      LoadBalancerArn: !Ref LoadBalancer
      Port: 80
      Protocol: HTTP
      DefaultActions:
      - Type: redirect 
        RedirectConfig:
          Protocol: HTTPS
          StatusCode: HTTP_301
          Port: 443

If you still use Classic Load Balancers, go with one of the NGINX configs described by the others.

Answer 3

Create a file .ebextensions/00_forward_http_to_https.config with the following content:

files: 
  /tmp/deployment/http_redirect.sh:
    mode: "000755"
    content: |
      APP_URL=`/opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/get-config environment --output yaml | grep -oP 'APP_URL: \K([^\s)\"](?!ttp:))+'`
      sed -ie 's@$proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;@$proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;\n        if ($http_x_forwarded_proto = 'http') { return 301 https://'"$APP_URL"'$request_uri; }@' /tmp/deployment/config/#etc#nginx#conf.d#00_elastic_beanstalk_proxy.conf

container_commands:
  http_redirect:
    command: "/tmp/deployment/http_redirect.sh"

Make sure to set the APP_URL environment variable from the AWS management console beforehand.