Create redirects in Nginx

Why use a redirect

You use a redirect whenever a website owner wants an address to reroute to another address, typically redirecting HTTP to HTTPS or redirecting one domain to another domain.

HTTP to HTTPS scenario:

You want your customers to reach your secure (SSL) site even if they type in http://yourwebsite.com or yourwebsite.com into their browser. This type of redirect accomplishes just that. For example, if your customer types in http://yourwebsite.com, the redirect in Nginx® redirects the request to https://yourwebsite.com.

One domain to another scenario:

You own yourwebsite.com, yourwebsite.org, and yourwebsite.net, and you want your customers to arrive at yourwebsite.com regardless of the URL they enter into their browser to visit your site.

How to redirect in Nginx

The following sections describe how to redirect from HTTP to HTTPS and from one domain to another domain.

HTTP to HTTPS

When you install an SSL certificate on your server, you have two server blocks for your website: one each for HTTP and HTTPS. The problem is you need a way to force traffic to your SSL-secured site (the HTTPS version). You can accomplish this by adding a redirect to the Nginx server block for your website.

Open the configuration file for your domain. The file should be named similar to /etc/nginx/vhost.d/yourwebsite.com.conf. The .conf indicates the configuration file for your domain. Open the file with your favorite text editor. The following example uses the vim editor:

vim /etc/nginx/vhost.d/yourdomain.com.conf

Your server block will look similar to this:

server {
	listen 80;
	server_name yourwebsite.com www.yourwebsite.com;
}

Depending on your particular configuration, this might contain more information than the preceding example, but this is a simple example focusing on the redirect option.

However, you want your customers to go to the secured version of yourwebsite.com, so you need to add a redirect to the server block in the configuration file. To do that, modify the block to look similar to the following example and save the file:

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

With the preceding redirect line in place, any time your customers type in yourwebsite.com or www.yourwebsite.com, the system automatically redirects them to the https://yourwebsite.com version of your website. Note, however, that you must add this line to the HTTP 80 server block, not the HTTPS 443 server block.

You should probably also redirect any https://www.yourwebsite.com requests to https://yourwebsite.com. You can do this by adding another redirect line to the 443 server block, often located below the 80 server block in the configuration file. That change looks similar to the following example:

server {
	listen 443;
	server_name www.yourwebsite.com;
	return 301 https://yourwebsite.com$request_uri;
}

server {
	listen 443;
	server_name yourwebsite.com;
}

Note: Your server blocks likely contain more information than the preceding simplified examples.

One domain to another

When you have a domain with multiple top-level domains (such as .com, .net, .org, and so on) and want all of those sites to reach the same website, use a redirect. For this example, we assume that you own yourwebsite.com, yourwebsite.org, and yourwebsite.net, and you want to redirect all of those to yourwebsite.com.

Edit the configuration file for your domain again. Instead of adding an HTTPS redirect, modify the server block as shown in the following example:

server {
	listen 80;
	server_name yourwebsite.net;
	return 301 $scheme://yourwebsite.com$request_uri;
}

server {
	listen 80;
	server_name yourwebsite.org;
	return 301 $scheme://yourwebsite.com$request_uri;
}

Now, whenever your customers enter yourwebsite.net or yourwebsite.org, the system redirects them to yourwebsite.com instead.

Save and close your configuration files after your edits and restart both nginx and php-fpm to make those changes go live.