Apache2: How to host apps at different ports with SSL?

Question

I'm trying to achieve quite simple task actually.

I bind application to a port, I enable SSLEngine at each VirtualHost entry for that port. Everything works beside one thing: if you type url that starts with HTTP://, not HTTPS://, you get the Bad Request error hinting you to use HTTPS:// request scheme. So the real question is how to redirect (302) from http://sub.domain.tld:4000/ to https://sub.domain.tld:4000?

Example seen there: http://isil.monsternett.no:8443

Thanks.

Edit:

Maybe I'm making mistake in core structure? This is what I use:

Listen 4000
NameVirtualHost 0.0.0.0:4000


<VirtualHost 0.0.0.0:4000>
    RewriteEngine On
    ...
</VirtualHost>


Listen 4001
NameVirtualHost 0.0.0.0:4001

<VirtualHost 0.0.0.0:4001>
    RewriteEngine On
    ...
</VirtualHost>


Listen N
NameVirtualHost 0.0.0.0:N


<VirtualHost 0.0.0.0:N>
    RewriteEngine On
    ...
</VirtualHost>

Solution

Apache Httpd, like most servers, doesn't support using the same port for two different protocols (HTTP and SSL/TLS here).

Doing so would require the server to be able to detect the protocol based on the content of the initial request: whether it's looks like an HTTP request or if it's an SSL/TLS Client Hello message. Some servers can do this (e.g. Grizzly in Java), but this is very unusual. Apache Httpd doesn't support this.

(As a side note, you'd be better off making sure that your users expect to use HTTPS anyway, since HTTP -> HTTPS redirections are only partly useful anyway.)

Comments

[Aleksandr Makov]

Thank you. Yes, the issue is very much like esthetic. Thank you for comprehensive answer.