Tomcat – How to change http to https when tomcat redirects happen

httpdredirectreverse-proxytomcat

I'm using elastic beanstalk single instance. So there is apache configured and tomcat is behind listening on http port 8080. Apache is configured on using ssl https 443.

The problem is that tomcat redirects using http. But I can't set up apache to change http to https. So as a consequence the mixed content error happens preventing application to work.

I tried so far the following settings:
In virtual host *:80 I put the

<IFModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/%$1 [R, L]
</IFModule>

Also I tried 

RedirectMatch ^(/.*)$ https://thepennantrace.com/$1

Both didn't work.

I wonder what would be the correct way of setting it?
(app is running through facebook, if directly accessed it won't show any errors)

Best Answer

You may want to solve this at the application level. You should be constructing a full path to the new location. This should consist of three components: the protocol (https), the hostname (from the request header) and the path (as required by the application). You may want a utility class that constructs links for the application to ensure consistency.

For links you may want to use relative paths. These will be sent to the originating host using the protocol they arrived on.

Redirecting the request resulting from the redirect, still leaves you with mixed content. This is because the initial redirect will be http rather than https.

On the Apache server level, there is a module that will rewrite the paths in the response from http to https. This is one way to fix a broken links sent by an application. However, I would limit that to applications you don't have access to.

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