non-www to www on https - .htaccess

Question

I had some trouble redirecting http to https. A friend helped me to find a solution, but there are still some troubles.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?thevideocards\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.thevideocards.com/$1 [R,L]
This redirects http to https, http to https://www but does not https://example to https://www.example. Anybody any idea what should change to force ALL traffic to https://www.example.com ?

Answer 1

It's important to understand what the code you're writing means - otherwise, who knows what backdoors someone is persuading you to add.
Let's break down what you have:
# Turn on Apache's "Rewrite Engine"; this is the module that processes the next few lines
RewriteEngine On
# Condition (for following rule): match only if the connection is on port 80
# Port 80 is (by convention) used for plain-text HTTP traffic
# An alternative to this would be to check for a secure connection directly:
# RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
# Condition (for following rule): match only if the HTTP Host header matches a regex
# The (www\.)? means that prefix is optional,
# so it will match both www.thevideocards.com and thevideocards.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?thevideocards\.com
# Rule (if the above two conditions also match):
# ^(.*)$ - Match any URL, and capture as $1
# https://www.thevideocards.com/$1 - Generate the replacement URL based on the captured part
# [R] - Send redirect response to browser, rather than processing internally
# [L] - Don't process any more rewrite rules for this request
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.thevideocards.com/$1 [R,L]
From the above, you should be able to create your own rule for the case you want:
Condition: host matches without the www.
Rule: redirect everything to the same URL with https://www. on the front
(Alternatively, spend 10 minutes searching and you'll probably find about a million pages talking about how to do this; but again, if you don't know what they do, how will you know which one to trust?)