Hello,

So a customer reached out to us today asking about how to configure HTTPS to HTTP redirects. This is actually really easy to do.

Think of it like this;

When you enable HTTP and HTTPS (allow insecure and secure traffic), the protocol is always HTTP hitting the server.

When you ‘only allow secure traffic’ it will always be HTTPS. Think of it like, if the load balancer has certificates on it and supports both protocols (i.e. terminates SSL at the load balancer), then the requests hitting the server will always be HTTP.

This is why the X_forwarded_Proto becomes important in your server being able to determine what traffic hitting it coming from load balancer originated from HTTPS protocol, and which originated from HTTP protocol. This is what allows you to effectively do the redirection on the cloud-server side.

I hope this helps!

So the rewrite rule on the server, using x_forwarded_proto to detect the protocol instead of the usual ‘https’ directive can be (or rather will need to be replaced) with a rule that uses the header instead of the regular incoming protocol to determine redirect.

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTP:http_x_forwarded_proto} !=http
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/some/path.*
    RewriteRule (.*) http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Quite simple, but took me the better part of half an hour to get my head properly around this 😀

You might be interested in achieving this on Windows systems with iis or similar, so check this link out which explains how to do that step by step in windows;

https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/configuring-load-balanced-sites-with-ssl-offloading-using-iis/