How to redirect from HTTP to HTTPS domain

Note: please note that Liferay has renamed its Liferay Experience Could offerings to Liferay SaaS (formerly LXC) and Liferay PaaS (formerly LXC-SM).

Issue

• When user hits the 'http://example.com' it should be redirected to the 'https://example.com' URL.

Environment

• Liferay PaaS

Resolution

• By default, the Nginx service uses the below snippet in the 'Nginx configuration' file which automatically redirects the domain from HTTP to HTTPS.

  if ($http_x_forwarded_proto = "http") {
   return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
   }

  For example:

  server {
          listen 80;
          server_name  example.com;
          
          if ($http_x_forwarded_proto = "http") {
          return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
      }
      }

  server {
          listen 80;
          server_name  www.example.com;
  
          if ($http_x_forwarded_proto = "http") {
          return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
      }
      }

Additional Information

• URL Redirects
  • Ensure that HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects first direct to a secure version of the same original site, to prevent man-in-the-middle redirects to malicious sites. Ensure that redirects never point to HTTP addresses. The configure URL redirects via your environment’s Nginx configuration file.
• Web Server Service (Nginx)

  • For PaaS environments, files in /webserver/configs/[ENV]/ are copied as overrides into /etc/nginx/ in the web server container in Liferay Cloud. Files in /webserver/configs/[ENV]/public/ are copied as overrides into var/www/html/.

  • And, as of web server version 6.0.0+, the nginx.conf file does not allow configurations that require root user permissions. Reference: Changes to the Web Server Service