Question

"Nginx welcome to nginx" displays www. prefix; works fine without.

I set up Lets encrypt using Certbot, everything works fine when I view my website via “website.com”, however when I use “www.website.com” I get a welcome to nginx landing page.

I’ve attempted to fix this by following a similar question posted on the community: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/set-up-django-nginx-and-ubuntu-18-04-welcome-to-nginx-landing-page-displays-when-www-prefix-is-loaded-with-domain-works-fine-without] without any success

/etc/nginx/sites-available/default:

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;

        # SSL configuration
        #
        # listen 443 ssl default_server;
        # listen [::]:443 ssl default_server;
        #
        # Note: You should disable gzip for SSL traffic.
        # See: https://bugs.debian.org/773332
        #
        # Read up on ssl_ciphers to ensure a secure configuration.
        # See: https://bugs.debian.org/765782
        #
        # Self signed certs generated by the ssl-cert package
        # Don't use them in a production server!
        #
        # include snippets/snakeoil.conf;

        root /var/www/html;

        # Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

        server_name _;

        location / {
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }

        # pass PHP scripts to FastCGI server
        #
        #location ~ \.php$ {
        #       include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        #
        #       # With php-fpm (or other unix sockets):
        #       fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
        #       # With php-cgi (or other tcp sockets):
        #       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        #}

        # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
        # concurs with nginx's one
        #
        #location ~ /\.ht {
        #       deny all;
        #}
}


# Virtual Host configuration for example.com
#
# You can move that to a different file under sites-available/ and symlink that
# to sites-enabled/ to enable it.
#
#server {
#       listen 80;
#       listen [::]:80;
#
#       server_name example.com;
#
#       root /var/www/example.com;
#       index index.html;
#
#       location / {
#               try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
#       }
#}

/etc/nginx/sites-available/website:

server {
    server_name website.com www.website.com;

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location /static/ {
        root /home/…/website;
    }

    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/run/gunicorn.sock;
    }

    listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/website.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/website.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot

}
server {
    if ($host = www.website.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot

    if ($host = website.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot

    listen 80;
    server_name server_name website.com www.website.com;
    return 404; # managed by Certbot


}

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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
January 14, 2021
Accepted Answer

Hi there @mrvd,

Your Nginx configuration looks all correct. What I could suggest is checking if your www version has a CNAME DNS record pointing to your main domain.

You can use this DNS tool to check that here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tools/dns

Let me know how it goes! Regards, Bobby

Update On visiting my website with the ‘www’ prefix it redirect to https://www.website.com with the error: “This site can’t be reached… unexpectedly closed the connection.”

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