[php] Redirecting from HTTP to HTTPS with PHP

I'm working on a shopping cart website and I would like to redirect the user to a HTTPS page when he's entering his billing details and maintain the HTTPS connection for the next pages until he logs out.

What do I need to install on the server (I'm using Apache) in order to do this, and how can this redirect be done from PHP?

Redirecting from HTTP to HTTPS with PHP on IIS

I was having trouble getting redirection to HTTPS to work on a Windows server which runs version 6 of MS Internet Information Services (IIS). I’m more used to working with Apache on a Linux host so I turned to the Internet for help and this was the highest ranking Stack Overflow question when I searched for “php redirect http to https”. However, the selected answer didn’t work for me.

After some trial and error, I discovered that with IIS, $_SERVER['HTTPS'] is set to off for non-TLS connections. I thought the following code should help any other IIS users who come to this question via search engine.

<?php
if (! isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) or $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'off' ) {
    $redirect_url = "https://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
    header("Location: $redirect_url");
    exit();
}
?>

Edit: From another Stack Overflow answer, a simpler solution is to check if($_SERVER["HTTPS"] != "on").

On my AWS beanstalk server, I don't see $_SERVER['HTTPS'] variable. I do see $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'] which can be either 'http' or 'https' so if you're hosting on AWS, use this:

if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] != 'localhost' and $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'] != "https") {
    $location = 'https://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
    header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
    header('Location: ' . $location);
    exit;
}

This is a good way to do it:

<?php
if (!(isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'on' || 
   $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 1) ||  
   isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO']) &&   
   $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'] == 'https'))
{
   $redirect = 'https://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
   header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
   header('Location: ' . $redirect);
   exit();
}
?>

You can always use

header('Location: https://www.domain.com/cart_save/');

to redirect to the save URL.

But I would recommend to do it by .htaccess and the Apache rewrite rules.