Spring MVC "redirect:" prefix always redirects to http -- how do I make it stay on https?

The short answer is, set the InternalResourceViewResolver's redirectHttp10Compatible property to false:

<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
  <property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView" />
  <property name="prefix" value="/" />
  <property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
  <property name="redirectHttp10Compatible" value="false" />
</bean>

You could do this on a per-request basis instead, by having your handler method return View instead of String, and creating the RedirectView yourself, and calling setHttp10Compatible(false).

(It turns out the culprit is HttpServletResponse.sendRedirect, which the RedirectView uses for HTTP 1.0 compatible redirects, but not otherwise. I guess this means it's dependent on your servlet container's implementation (?); I observed the problem in both Tomcat and Jetty.)

Spring Boot provides this nice configuration based solution to this if you're running behind a proxy server, simply add these two properties to your application.properties file:

server.tomcat.remote_ip_header=x-forwarded-for
server.tomcat.protocol_header=x-forwarded-proto

This works for me deploying the otherwise unchanged spring-boot-sample-web-ui to Elastic Beanstalk behind an https load balancer. Without these properties the redirect on line 68 of the MessageController defaults to http and hangs.

Hope this helps.

What worked for me is adding this to application.properties server.tomcat.use-relative-redirects=true

So when you have:

public function redirect() {
  return "redirect:/"
}

Without the server.tomcat.use-relative-redirects it will add a Location header like: http://my-host.com/. With the server.tomcat.use-relative-redirects it will look like: /. So it will be relative to the current page from browser perspective.