Changing port from 80 to 443 redirects site to index (SSL related)

Posted on July 8, 2016

Hi there, i am trying to install my SSL certificate and the problem seems to be that

As soon as the virtualhost port in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf or 000-default.conf is changed from 80 to 443 (needed for SSL) my website gets directed to a index folder of the html

I am running Ubuntu 14.04 w/wordpress & apache

Any help whatsoever to solve this is appreciated

Here is what my 000-default.conf looks like

<VirtualHost *:443> ServerName prollagen.com SSLEngine on SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/key (redacted) SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/key (redacted) SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/ssl/key (redacted) DocumentRoot /var/www/html

    <Directory /var/www/html/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
    
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

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Ryan Quinn

July 8, 2016

I would recommend trying to add

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

and restarting apache with

service apache2 restart

This will direct apache to use your index.php file rather than showing a directory index.

blakeingram405

July 9, 2016

So cloudflare was the problem! As with “Options -Indexes”, when placing - in front of indexes apache throws out an error stating “if an option has - or +, all other options must have the same”

What would another “option” be within 000-default?

Jonathan Tittle

July 9, 2016

@blakeingram405

Try running the command below and post the output.

apachectl configtest

Beyond that, Apache can be finicky at times, so you may want to try defining the DocumentRoot at the top, so your configuration would end up looking like:

<VirtualHost *:443>
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html"
ServerName prollagen.com
ServerAlias *.prollagen.com
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/key
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/key
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/ssl/key

<Directory /var/www/html/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
</Directory>

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Note, I added a ServerAlias line below ServerName to allow other requests to resolve to the primary domain. You should also setup a similar block to allow requests on port 80 as well.

Using the above, you’re essentially telling Apache to listen on Port 443 only.