Question

App - redirect from non-www to www

Posted on April 3, 2023
DigitalOcean App Platform DNS Networking
Asked by Klaas van der Molen

I have a NodeJS app deployed on Digital Ocean, with a domain attached to it.

The app is hosted under https://www.myapp.com

I would like to redirect https://myapp.com to https://www.myapp.com

However, The DNS is managed by Digital Ocean. I can add records, but the record “name” is automatically pre-fixed with www.myapp.com.

So how can I achieve this redirect?

Thank you, Klaas

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• April 4, 2023

Accepted Answer

Hi there,

I believe that this should be doable as you are already using DigitalOcean for your DNS management:

First add both the www and the non-www domains to your App Platform:
This will automatically take care of the DNS records for you so you don’t need to manually add any new recrods.
Then, you can to set up an HTTP redirect from the main domain name to the www subdomain. To do this, you can modify your Node.js application code to handle the redirection logic. Here is a quick example:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  if (req.hostname === 'example.com') {
    return res.redirect(301, `https://www.${req.hostname}${req.url}`);
  }
  next();
});

// Your other routes and middleware go here

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Server running on port ${port}`);
});

In this example, we create a middleware that checks if the incoming request’s hostname is example.com. If so, it redirects the request to www.example.com with a 301 redirect status code.

Let me know how it goes!

Best,

Bobby