How to redirect all https requests to https www subdomain with Nginx?

January 7, 2017 4.7k views
Nginx Ubuntu 16.04
Tim321
By:
Tim321

I have redirects for http to https working fine. But redirects from https to https does not work. Below is my nginx config file. I would think that the if condition would solve things, but it doesn’t. https://example.com gives the error refused to connect when it should redirect to https://www.example.com. How can I fix this? Note, the ssl cert I'm using does support both www.example.com and example.com. I followed the setup from https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-16-04 if that helps.

server {
       listen 80 default_server;
       listen [::]:80 default_server;
       server_name example.com www.example.com;
       return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
        listen 443 ssl http2 default_server;
        listen [::]:443 ssl http2 default_server;
        include snippets/ssl-example.com.conf;
        include snippets/ssl-params.conf;

        root /var/www/html;

        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

        server_name _;
         if ($host = "example.com") {
        return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
     }

        add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains; preload";

        location ~ /.well-known {
                allow all;
        }

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
}
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4 Answers
jtittle1 January 7, 2017

@Tim321

Remove:

if ($host = "example.com") {
    return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}

Change:

server_name _;

To:

server_name example.com www.example.com;

Then restart NGINX and let me know if that works.

Reply
  • Tim321 January 8, 2017

    @jtittle Doesn't work.

    • jtittle1 January 8, 2017

      @Tim321

      Are you still getting refused to connect or another error?

      The best thing to do at this point is check your error logs and see what they are showing. You can do this by checking /var/log/nginx or, in the event the logs are contained in the primary directory, /etc/nginx.

      You can run tail -20 error.log on the file to display the last 20 items logged to the error.log file. That'll help us to see what's really going on and what, if anything else, is actually causing the error(s).

      • Tim321 January 11, 2017

        Your right. It was another error. Your solution worked.

        • harshmodi April 2, 2018

          @Tim321

          Thanks for raising this issue. Its all over the web with the "example.com" reference.

          Can you tell me what finally worked for you? I am struggling with this issue.

newbie January 8, 2017

you can also try following. 

server {
       listen 80 default_server;
       listen [::]:80 default_server;
       server_name example.com www.example.com;
       return 301 https://www.$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
        listen 443 ssl http2 default_server;
        listen [::]:443 ssl http2 default_server;
        include snippets/ssl-example.com.conf;
        include snippets/ssl-params.conf;

        root /var/www/html;

        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

        server_name example.com www.example.com;

        add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains; preload";

        location ~ /.well-known {
                allow all;
        }

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
}

type following just to be sure you dont have problem in any other place.

sudo nginx -t
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Tim321 January 8, 2017
[deleted]
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harshmodi April 2, 2018

@Tim321

I am stuck in the same space and I am unable to find any answers. Can you please help?

My destination URL is hosted on Amazon AWS.

What worked for you?

Thanks.

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