Redirecting HTTP requests to HTTPS

Question

I have read a lot and spent a lot of hours trying to reach the right way to set a good htaccess in order to redirect an HTTP site to HTTPS.

There are a lot of tutorials on the Internet, even on Stack Overflow, but some of them seem to be outdated and don't meet good SEO practices.

The scenario is the following one:

• My site has Cloudflare enabled
• My site has a valid SSL on server-side

The current htaccess of my site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MYSITE\.cl$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.MYSITE.cl/1ドル [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/?find$ find.php [L]
RewriteRule ^/?do$ do.php [L]
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
Options -Indexes

and I want to change .htaccess in order to keep my good SEO rank on Google, use the HTTPS and keep the .WWW:

#OLD PART
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# Non-www to www (NEW PART)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/1ドル [R=301,L]
# Non-SSL to SSL (NEW PART)
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}/1ドル [R=301,L]
#OLD PART AGAIN
RewriteRule ^/?find$ find.php [L]
RewriteRule ^/?do$ do.php [L]
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
Options -Indexes

Will this work like a charm? Do you have a better idea? Does my code have any redundancy? I think that I must set Cloudflare SSL parameters to FULL SSL (STRICT). Is that right?

• Mast: "Will this work like a charm?" Did you try? What's your experience with it so far?

Answer 1

Since your actual machines are being handled by the Cloudflare based forwarding, you can let them handle the enforced SSL and www-prefixing rules instead.

However, if you do plan on the FULL SSL feature of cloudflare, you can combine the 2 separate rules into a single one:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://www.%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NE]

Notice that I do not rely on the 1ドル part of the URI, as matching (and capturing) that is just redundant.

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Similarly, the next 2 rules can be combined:

RewriteRule ^/?(do|find)$ /1ドル.php [L]

You can chose to leave it as 1ドル.php, but I prefer giving paths from the doc-root in my rules. It is just a personal preference.

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Lastly, consider providing some gap between the Options directive and the directives provided by mod-rewrite. Again, it is another personal habit of mine; but makes it clearer to maintain large rule sets later on.

• hjpotter92: @Gerrit0 oh damn! Didn't notice that :/ Fixed now. Thanks :)