How to redirect (301) HTTP to HTTPS in Google Cloud Platform using Load Balancer

Photo by 35mm on Unsplash

Prerequisites

Let’s assume that you:

• are using the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• have a static website hosted in a public Google Cloud Storage bucket;
• have a dedicated Load Balancer that serves your HTTPS traffic;
• encounter the annoying Error: 404 Not Found — The requested URL was not found on this erver when trying to navigate to your static website using HTTP (instead of HTTPS)

So, you want to redirect automatically your HTTP traffic to HTTPS and say goodbye to the 404 error.

No problem, here are all the steps that you need to follow in order to implement the 301 HTTP redirect.

Create a new Load Balancer to redirect the HTTP traffic to HTTPS

First of all, go to your load balancing page in GCP: Network services > Load Balancing.

This is the load balancing page in GCP

Click on the +CREATE LOAD BALANCER button and leave the default options for Internet facing or internal only and for Global or regional sections, then click on the CONTINUE button.

Leave the default options on the first view of creating a new load balancer in GCP

Add a meaningful name to the new load balancer and skip the first step Backend configuration (because it’s not necessary in our case), going directly to the second step Host and path rules.

Skip the first step and go to Host and path rules step

In the Mode section select the Advanced host and path rule (URL redirect, URL rewrite) option and click on the dropdown:

• in the Action section, select the Redirect the client to different host/path option
• in the Path redirect section, select the option Prefix redirect
• leave blank Path value
• in the Redirect response code section, be sure that the value is set to 301 — Moved Permanently
• in the HTTPS redirect section, select Enable option by ticking the box
• click on the Done button

Second step Host and path rules configuration

Move into the third step Frontend configuration and:

• add a meaningful name to the configuration
• leave as default all other fields
• in the IP address dropdown, select the static IP address that you already generated with the existing HTTPS load balancer
• click on the Done button

Select the right static IP address that you created on the existing HTTPS load balancer configuration

Optional: you can go to the fourth step Review and finalise to check the settings.

Then you click on Create.

Check the settings and create the new load balancer

Test the new redirect

Good, you finally created the new load balancer!

Now you just have to wait some minutes (time can vary due to the DNS propagation) before seeing your automatically 301 redirect in action.

To check that the redirect works properly, try to navigate to your static website using the HTTP protocol and an incognito window in your browser.

The expected behaviour is that if you type:

http://yourstaticwebsite.com

you are automatically redirected to

https://yourstaticwebsite.com

In the Google Chrome browser’s Network tab you can see the 301 redirect.

You can clearly see the 301 redirect in Google Chrome browser

Thank you for reading, I hope this article was useful.

If you like it, please give it a clap and share it with your network.

References

• official Google Cloud Platform documentation here
• nice video (although the Google Cloud Platform has a different UI now) here
• if you do not have an HTTPS load balancer already in place and you need to create a new HTTPS load balancer, you can follow this official doc

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