~ Working with SSL in Codeigniter ~

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

For the best part of 3 months I’ve been trying to find an elegant way to switch between http:// and https:// for certain pages. I crawled the forums and found a number of solutions. The first was to use the .htaccess file and mod_rewrite to rewrite the url. This solution was fine on one server but I had to switch recently and suddenly it was failing miserably for no reason that I could determine, so I was forced to find another way. As always, finding another way is a _good_ thing, and the way I found is nicer, easier and much more dynamic.

Create a file in application/helper called ssl_helper.php

if (!function_exists('force_ssl'))
{
    function force_ssl()
    {
        $CI =& get_instance();
        $CI->config->config['base_url'] =
                 str_replace('http://', 'https://',
                 $CI->config->config['base_url']);
        if ($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] != 443)
        {
            redirect($CI->uri->uri_string());
        }
    }
}

function remove_ssl()
{
    $CI =& get_instance();
    $CI->config->config['base_url'] =
                  str_replace('https://', 'http://',
                  $CI->config->config['base_url']);
    if ($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] != 80)
    {
        redirect($CI->uri->uri_string());
    }
}

Load the helper, then in the constructor for any controller that requires ssl, simply insert:

force_ssl();

In every controller that you don’t want to have ssl put:

if (function_exists('force_ssl')) remove_ssl();

And there you go. I found the force_ssl function on the Codeigniter forum, so all credit goes to the original poster. All I did was provide a function to switch back.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 4:49 am and is filed under programming, toolbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.