Redirect http to https but exclude some

Question

I'm using nginx and I want to know if it's possible to do this.

Now to manage my vhost, I create them separately in /etc/nginx/sites-available (activate them after)

mydomain.com
subdomain.mydomain.com
subdomain1.mydomain.com
anotherdomain.com

So to redirect http to https I create a redirect vhost, that contain :

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;
        server_name _;
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

mydomain.com and all other subdomain are under https.

But the problem is anotherdomain.com, I don't want to redirect it to https. And here I don't know how to do this. I've got an idea :

Create only on vhost, that contain all the config, and do this :

# Config of anotherdomain.com

# Redirect all domain/subdomain after this part to https
server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;
        server_name _;
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

# Config of mydomain.com
# Config of subdomain.com
# Config of subdomain1.com

This will work as a kind of override, like in CSS ?

Thanks for your feedback.

Answer 1

Typically you will have one forwarding block for each domain / subdomain. Redirection using the default_server isn't something I've seen done before, though in most cases it's probably ok.

So instead of using default server you define a block as follows, either for just the domain in question or for each domain

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name anotherdomain.com;

  location / {
    // whatever
  }
}

This will override the default_server block. Personally I'd define forwarding blocks for each website by domain, just because it seems neater.

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

Answer 2

default_server is the virtual host used when the request does not match any other virtual host.

So, therefore you need to define a virtual host that matches anotherdomain.com on port 80. nginx will then use that configuration instead of your default_server virtual host.