Endless Redirect Loop with AWS ELB and wordpress site using wordpress https plugin

Question

I have configured an AWS ELB to point to my Ubuntu Server running the Wordpress 3.2.1. Everything worked great on the server until I put it behind a load balancer.

I setup the load balancer to forward port 80 to port 80 and port 443 to port 80.

I setup my virtual hosts file to check for the headers from the elb:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
RewriteRule !/status https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R]

Now whenever I go to an https url I get this message:

This webpage has a redirect loop
The webpage at https://mywebsite.com/securepage/ has resulted in too many redirects

As soon as I disable the wordpress https plugin
(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-https/)
The pages work but are now full of mixed content. pages that should be https are no longer https.

As soon as I access the server directly instead of through the elb it works again.

Any ideas on how I could get this to work with an AWS ELB?

Answer 1

I would hazard a guess without you posting your ELB configuration that the ELB is redirecting HTTPS (443/tcp) traffic to the EC2 instance on HTTP (80/tcp). Then you're .htaccess and plugin are trying to redirect it back to HTTPS because it is being seen over HTTP.

Go take a look at your EC2 console under Network & Security > Load Balancers and I would imagine you'll see the Port Configuration says something along the lines of 443 forwarding to 80 (HTTPS, Certificate: blah)