Detecting HTTPS requests in PHP

Question

The problem that I am having has to do with the need to keep some urls of a website protected by HTTPS and the rest kicked to HTTP.

Normally, you have $_SERVER['HTTP_HTTPS'] or $_SERVER['HTTPS'] (depending on your flavor of Apache). You also can check the port - it's 80 for normal traffic and 443 for HTTPS.

My problem is that the certificate sits on the loadbalancer, and all these variables are unavailable, and the webserver sees http://www.foo.com on port 80. One way to fix this is to tell the loadbalancer to send the traffic on a different port, but I wonder if there are other ways to detect HTTPS coming from the load balancer?

Answer 1

If anybody has the same issue behind an Amazon AWS Elastic Load Balancer, the solution is simple because the $_SERVER variable will include:

[HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PORT] => 443
[HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO] => https

So, to get the protocol, you could use:

function getRequestProtocol() {
    if(!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO']))
        return $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'];
    else 
        return !empty($_SERVER['HTTPS']) ? "https" : "http";
}