simplesamlphp keeps redirecting from https to http

Just had this issue – was going to the simplesamlphp installation to test something, after choosing an IDP on the “Select your identity provider page”, it was redirecting from https to http before going off to the IdP with a SAML request for an AssertionConsumerService URL on the http protocol (which of course was not recognised by the IDP).

The fix was to update the baseurlpath in the config.php file:

It was previously set to a relative path:

changing this to a fully qualified path resolved the issue and kept everything on https: