NGINX - Redirecting www to non-www after redirecting http to https

Question

I've checked out quite a few other answers to similar questions as well as tutorials on DigitalOcean, etc., with no success. Sorry for what is probably a very obvious problem - I'm new to this.

Essentially, I need to set up redirects so that http://, https://www., and http://www. all redirect to https://.

Currently, https:// works fine and http:// redirects to https://. I need to redirect www traffic because the SSL cert is only configured for non-www. However, when I've tried to add another server block to the config to redirect www (http and https) to https://, the server closes the connection on all 4 variants.

Here's my config:

# HTTP - redirect to HTTPS
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.example.com example.com;
    return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}

# HTTPS www - redirect to non-www RESETS CONNECTION
#server {
#    listen 443;
#    server_name www.example.com;
#    return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
#}


# HTTPS — proxy all requests to the Node app
server {
    # Enable HTTP/2
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    server_name example.com;

    # Use the Let’s Encrypt certificates
    ssl_certificate /etc/not/my/path/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/not/my/path/live/example.com/privkey.pem;

    # Include the SSL configuration from cipherli.st
    include snippets/ssl-params.conf;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;
        proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:2368/;
        proxy_ssl_session_reuse off;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
        proxy_redirect off;
    }
}

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Again I know it's probably painfully obvious but I just can't get this to work. Should I be doing this with something other than an NGINX redirect?

Answer 1

You cannot redirect www.example.com https traffic to example.com, unless you have the certificate for www.example.com. SSL negotiation uses domain name, and redirection happens only after SSL layer has been negotiated.

Answer 2

server {
    server_name www.example.com example.com
    listen 80;

    location / {
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 permanent;
    }
}

server {
    server_name www.example.com;
    listen 443 ssl;

     [... ssl configuration ...]

    location / {
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 permanent;
    }
}

server {
    server_name example.com;
    listen 443 ssl;


    [ ... main block ... ]
}