Moodle in English: How to make the entire Moodle website over https?

I have successfully installed a certificate and turned on the https loging option. My next step is to make the entire website run over https.

I have changed my config file $CFG->wwwroot = 'https://www.mysite.com'; to point to the https but I don't think this is all I need to do.

Do I have to change any configuration on my Apache server?

I run moodle on a LAMP system.

Thank you for your help.

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Re: How to make the entire Moodle website over https?

by Davi DePaula - Thursday, 12 June 2014, 8:07 PM

I found out that if you add the following lines into the "default" file in apache2 that holds the "VirtualHost *:80" configuration, all http requests get redirected to https.

ServerName www.sitename.com

Redirect / https://www.sitename.com/

Now, all of the website seems to be going over ssl. Is this the correct way to do it?

Also, I'm having a problem now with the Theme. The https redirect seems to have broken the Theme. It looks like the css file or maybe the Java Scripts don't get loaded now. What I'm I missing here?

BTW, I'm running Moodle 2.4 and using the Anomaly Theme.

Thank you for your help.

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Re: How to make the entire Moodle website over https?

by john saylor - Thursday, 12 June 2014, 9:24 PM

there are many ways to do this. probably the easiest is to just not run anything but the SSL site. that is, there is no unencrypted data being served at all. this means changing the apache configuration and requires understanding how that configuration file operates. it's probably better, though, to do a redirect at the webserver level. so that anyone coming in to your site on the plain text port will be redirected to the encrypted one. i think you are using the apache server, so here is some documentation with a few examples: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/rewrite/remapping.html you may not be running a 2.4 server, but you can probably find the 2.2 documentation which is on the same site. yes, it's somewhat complicated. so you may have to learn something yourself or get some help with it. good luck!

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Re: How to make the entire Moodle website over https?

by Davi DePaula - Thursday, 12 June 2014, 9:41 PM

Thank you john for your help. I ended up using the following rewrite code in the /var/apache2/sites-avaiable/default file and now it is working well. That has also resolved the Theme issue I was having.

<VirtualHost*:80>ServerName www.mysite.comRedirect/ https://www.mysite.com/</VirtualHost><VirtualHost*:80>ServerName www.example.com
</VirtualHost>

Thanks.

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Re: How to make the entire Moodle website over https?

by Davi DePaula - Friday, 13 June 2014, 12:09 AM

One more problem that I ran into when making Moodle completely over ssl is that the embedded objects in the website that have a http connection will not display.

For example, A Youtube embedded video code that looks like this:

will not display because in the page because of the http request.

But if you change the http directive to https like so:

It works just fine.

Of course you'll have to make sure if the servers you are pulling the embedded objects from allow a https connection.

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