Redirecting EC2 Elastic Load Balancer from HTTP to HTTPS

AWS Application Load Balancers now support native HTTP to HTTPS redirect.

To enable this in the console, do the the following:

1. Go to your Load Balancer in EC2 and tab "Listeners"
2. Select "View/edit rules" on your HTTP listener
3. Delete all rules except for the default one (bottom)
4. Edit default rule: choose "Redirect to" as an action, leave everything as default and enter "443" as a port.

The same can be achieved by using the CLI as described here.

It is also possible to do this in Cloudformation, where you need to set up a Listener object like this:

  HttpListener:    Type: AWS::ElasticLoadBalancingV2::Listener    Properties:      LoadBalancerArn: !Ref LoadBalancer      Port: 80      Protocol: HTTP      DefaultActions:      - Type: redirect         RedirectConfig:          Protocol: HTTPS          StatusCode: HTTP_301          Port: 443

If you still use Classic Load Balancers, go with one of the NGINX configs described by the others.

ELB sets X-Forwarded-Proto header, you can use it to detect if original request was to HTTP and redirect to HTTPS then.

You can try this in your server conf:

if ($http_x_forwarded_proto = 'http') {    return 301 https://yourdomain.com$request_uri;}

Take a look at ELB docs.

I had the same problem, in my situation HTTPS was handled entirely by ELB and I didn't know my source domain ahead of time so I ended up doing something like:

server {  listen 81;  return 301 https://$host$request_uri;}server {  listen 80;  # regular server rules ...}

And then of course pointing the ELB 'https' to the instance port 80 and then the 'http' route to the instance port 81.