issues with .htaccess when Cloudfront to Virtual Apache Server on EC2 with Ubuntu and Amazon SSL

Question

I have Apache Virtual Server on EC2 directly connected to cloudfront distribution.

**http to https and www to non-www redirect not working with the following `.htaccess`**

```
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)(.+) [OR]
    RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?(.+)
    RewriteRule ^ https://%2%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
    ```
**Requests to http://example.com return 200 OK**

**Response Headers:**

```
    HTTP/2 200 OK
    content-type: text/html
    content-length: 53335
    date: Tue, 06 Jun 2023 07:28:02 GMT
    server: Apache/2.4.52 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/3.0.2
    last-modified: Thu, 08 Dec 2022 10:14:20 GMT
    etag: "d057-5ef4e4ce33700"
    accept-ranges: bytes
    vary: Accept-Encoding
    x-cache: Miss from cloudfront
    via: 1.1 259df3f3acee8ca070d87aedc7b2.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
    x-amz-cf-pop: MXP63-P1
    alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
    x-amz-cf-id: oxvbXrSwIpgwMjr9_5ucSj0x9YF3qRL4ablFSQqlgT==
    X-Firefox-Spdy: h2
    ```
 and here the **Request Headers**

```    
    GET / HTTP/2
    Host: www.example.com
    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/113.0
    Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
    Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
    Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
    Connection: keep-alive
    Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
    Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
    Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
    Sec-Fetch-Site: none
    Sec-Fetch-User: ?1
    Sec-GPC: 1
    Pragma: no-cache
    Cache-Control: no-cache
    TE: trailers
    ```

**That is the Cloudfront configuration + Route 53 Configuration : **
https://i.stack.imgur.com/bbHKj.jpg

Accepted Answer

Your configuration only supports http and not https.

You may want to configure cloudfront to match viewer as per document so that clients follow the redirect.

Otherwise configure cloudfront to communicate with your ec2 via https only.

Please see details here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/using-https-cloudfront-to-custom-origin.html

**Updated**

For viewer redirection you need to configure that on the cloudfront distro and remove the redirect on apache as you do not have ssl running on the webserver. Please follow these instructions to force viewer redirection https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/using-https-viewers-to-cloudfront.html#

Try the following in your htaccess file too

```
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
```

Answer

I have recently configured my laravel website to work on CDN, every thing works fine as expected except the existing rules for https and www redirection. My existing rules are creating too many redirect issue.

AWS: Source origin website -example(.com) (https) CNAME Alias - www.example(.com) (https)

Could you please suggest what can I do with my basic htaccess rule as below. I need below rules or else it will break my laravel website functionality. please suggest a rule to add https and www redirection which should work with below lines.

```
 
  Options -Indexes 
 
  RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|resources|robots\.txt) 
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 
  RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?/$1 [L,QSA]

```

I tried below two lines and it is throwing the error -- too many redirects.

```
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
  RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
    
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
  RewriteRule (.*) https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
```

issues with .htaccess when Cloudfront to Virtual Apache Server on EC2 with Ubuntu and Amazon SSL

Relevant content