Using HTTPS instead of HTTP

Question

I have a website that user have to loggin to. I want to use HTTPS so make a secure encrypted connection to the server to check the user name and password.

Currently on my server i have a folder called httpdocs, this is where my website is store, i also have a folder called httpsdocs.

Now as i stated my website is stored in httpdocs so logically i would go to http://website.com

But i found that if i go to https://website.com i get a secure connect to the pages stored in httpdocs.

Anyway, my question is, whenever i go to another link i loose the secure connect (URL goes back to http://) So how do i keep it all secure? Would i have to use the full URL in the href because that seems a bit lame instead of just using href=page2.php .

I'm new this area of website developing, but i am experienced in developing if that helps you.

Thanks a bunch for the help.

Some basic tutorials or reading material would be awesome if anyone knows of anything good?

Thanks again.

Answer 1

To answer your question in the comments you should use mod_rewrite (assuming its enabled):

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R,L]

that will send any webpage to https.

Answer 2

Do not use http://foo.com/path in urls, use //foo.com/path instead (or, even better, if you stay on the same server, use /path - it surely works). Doing full urls is bringing redundancy and brittleness. Avoid it.