SSL Redirect in VirtualHost causing url to break

Question

I recently configured by website to direct all traffic through https. I did this by modifying the vhost file to show this

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/srv/http/example"
    ServerName example.com
    Redirect permanent / https://example.com/
</VirtualHost> 

This works fine when I go to the root of the site i.e. example.com, however when I try to go to a subdirectory I get a weird break in the url. For example if I type example.com/blog it tries to redirect to https://example.comblog. What is going on here?

Solution 1

I managed to solve the problem by changing:

https://example.com/

to

https://example.com\/

This seems to have solved the problem, I assume that at some point Apache stripped off the slash.

Solution 2

For redirecting a TLS/SSL site to a non-TLS site, see the details below:

Adding a trailing slash, and escaping it with a backslash restores the missing slash.

I found that my particular site needed the redirect in both virtual hosts (*:80 and *:443) but the TLS one was not working properly. The following added to both virtual hosts fixed the issue.

Redirect permanent "/" http://example.com\/  

Note: The apache documentation shows adding quotes around everything. In my case the above worked just fine, allowing pages in the URL to be resolved as expected. Source: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/en/rewrite/avoid.html

Examples extrapolated from Source:

Redirect "/one/" "http://one.example.com/"
Redirect permanent "/" "http://example.com/"

Hope this helps someone.

Comments

[masegaloeh]

I can't reproduce this error if the Redirect line become Redirect permanent / https://example.com (e.g without trailing slash). With your configuration above, the redirection works properly.

[stmfunk]

I tried removing the trailing / and using RedirectMatch permanent ^/(.*)$ https:/example.com/$1 and neither worked.