How to get secure url in Magento

How do you get secure or unsecure urls in magento? It's quite simple actually. We discussed about getting different base url types in previous blog post here - [Magento get base url].

Now we will show you how to get secure urls in magento. So in previous post we got base url as:

Mage::getBaseUrl();
Mage::getBaseUrl('skin');
// etc...

Also, in one of our previous magento post, we mentioned this:

Mage::getUrl('');

Now, we are going to add extra param, so magento returns secure url as we are after. We just need to add 'true' as second parameter when we need secure url.

Mage::getBaseUrl('type_of_link', 'secure_or_unsecure');

Mage::getBaseUrl('', true);
Mage::getBaseUrl('skin', true);

And for: Mage::getUrl($route, $params); you can pass array('_secure'=>true) as second parameter to get secure urls like this:

Mage::getUrl('',array('_secure'=>true));
Mage::getUrl('mymodule/mycontroller/action', array('_secure'=>true));

References:

Mage.php and app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Store.php