When you have your web site or application up and running behind a domain, it is often desirable to also allow your users access to it via the plain domain name and the www subdomain. That is, they should be able to visit your domain with or without the “www.” prefix, e.g. example.com
or www.example.com
, in a web browser, and be presented with the same content. While there are a variety of ways to set this up, the best solution, for consistency and SEO considerations, is to choose which domain you prefer, plain or www, and redirect the other one to the preferred domain. This type of redirect is called a Permanent Redirect, or “301 redirect”, and can be easily set up by properly configuring your DNS resource records and web server software.
This tutorial will show you how to redirect a www URL to non-www, e.g. www.example.com
to example.com
, with Nginx on Ubuntu 14.04. We will also show you how to redirect in the other direction, from a non-www URL to www. The CentOS 7 version of this tutorial is available here.
If you want to perform this type of redirect with Apache as your web server, you should follow this tutorial instead: How to Redirect www to non-www with Apache on Ubuntu 14.04.
This tutorial assumes that you have superuser privileges, i.e. sudo
or root, on the server that is running Nginx. If you don’t already have that set up, follow this tutorial: Initial Server Setup on Ubuntu 14.04.
It is assumed that you have Nginx installed. If you do not already have this set up, there are several tutorials on the subject under the Nginx tag.
You must be able to add records to the DNS that is managing your domain. If you do not already have a domain, you may purchase one from a domain registrar, and manage it with the registrar’s DNS or DigitalOcean’s DNS. In this tutorial, we will use the DigitalOcean DNS to create the necessary records.
Let’s get started by configuring your DNS records.
In order to set up the desired redirect, www.example.com
to example.com
or vice versa, you must have an A record for each name.
Open whatever you use to manage your DNS. For our example, we’ll use the DigitalOcean DNS.
If a domain (also known as a zone) record does not already exist, create one now. The hostname should be your domain, e.g. example.com
, and the IP address should be set to the public IP address of your Nginx server. This will automatically create an A record that points your domain to the IP address that you specified. If you are using another system to manage your domain, you may need to add this manually.
Next, add another A record with “www” as the hostname (or “www.example.com” if the partial subdomain doesn’t work), and specify the same IP address.
When you have created both records, it should look something like this:
Note: This will also work with CNAME records, as long as the canonical name’s A record refers to the IP address of your Nginx web server.
Now your server should be accessible via the www and non-www domain, but we still need to set up the redirect. We’ll do that now.
In order to perform the 301 redirect, you must add a new Nginx server block that points to your original server block.
Open your Nginx server block configuration in an editor. We’ll use the default configuration file, /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
, in our example:
sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
Your original server block should already be defined. Depending on which direction you want to redirect, use one of the following options.
If you want redirect users from www to a plain, non-www domain, insert this configuration:
server {
server_name www.example.com;
return 301 $scheme://example.com$request_uri;
}
Save and exit. This configures Nginx to redirect requests to “www.example.com” to “example.com”. Note that there should be another server block that defines your non-www web server.
To put the changes into effect, restart Nginx:
sudo service nginx restart
Note that if you are using HTTPS, the listen
directive should be set to port 443
instead of 80
.
Use this curl command to ensure that the non-www domain redirects to the www domain (replace the highlighted part with your actual domain):
curl -I http://www.example.com
You should get a 301 Moved Permanently
response, that shows the non-www redirect location, like this:
Output:HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2015 18:20:19 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 193
Connection: keep-alive
Location: http://example.com/
Of course, you should access your domain in a web browser (www and non-www) to be sure.
If you want redirect users from a plain, non-www domain to a www domain, add this server block:
server {
server_name example.com;
return 301 $scheme://www.example.com$request_uri;
}
Save and exit. This configures Nginx to redirect requests to “example.com” to “www.example.com”. Note that there should be another server block that defines your www web server.
To put the changes into effect, restart Nginx:
sudo service nginx restart
Note that if you are using HTTPS, the listen
directive should be set to port 443
instead of 80
.
Use this curl command to ensure that the non-www domain redirects to the www domain (replace the highlighted part with your actual domain):
curl -I http://example.com
You should get a 301 Moved Permanently
response, that shows the www redirect location, like this:
Output:HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2015 18:20:19 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 193
Connection: keep-alive
Location: http://www.example.com/
Of course, you should access your domain in a web browser (www and non-www) to be sure.
That’s it! Your Nginx permanent redirect is now configured properly, and your users will be able to access your web server via your non-www and www domain.
Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in our Questions & Answers section, find tutorials and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business, and subscribe to topics of interest.
Sign upClick below to sign up and get $100 of credit to try our products over 60 days!
You should use:
Otherwise you will get
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
for the www and non-www versions.Using the code above you’ll get
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
for the non-www domain. See: http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls#Server_NameHow do I go it on config with SSL ? Should I create 3 server blocks ?
Every form of www to non-www redirects works fine except
https://www.example.com
. When I runcurl -I https://www.example.com
I getHTTP/1.1 302 Found
and no redirects!This is really helpful!
Great tutorial!
But doesn’t a simple
do the trick?
It didn’t work for me. I researched and fixed with this way. Open /etc/nginx/sites-available/example . And edit the file like that:
I use like:
Hello, i`m very new to this, could you please tell me how to save after putting:
Thank you
Thanks, it is now working properly for my site.
Hmm, it didn’t work for me. I arrive to the “Welcome to nginx” page when browsing to “myotherdomain.com”