Nginx rewrite to eliminate "www" not working

Question

I've looked at many SE threads and done various google searches and can't figure out why i can't redirect www.mysite.com to mysite.com on my nginx server.

The 1st server block does the http://mysite.info -> https://mysite.info redirect as you'd expect. So i'm not sure why the 2nd server block isn't doing the same for the www.mysite.info -> mysite.info.

Here's the relevant part of my nginx.conf file:

server {
    server_name mysite.info;
    rewrite ^ https://$server_name$request_uri? permanent;
}

server {
    server_name www.mysite.info;
    rewrite ^ https://mysite.info$request_uri? permanent;
}

server {
    listen   443;
    ssl    on;
    server_name mysite.info;
    # other directives, handling PHP, etc.
}

Any thoughts on what's going wrong?

Shane Madden · Answer 1 · 2014-12-18T00:06:29.553

7

You're redirecting to $server_name, which is www.mysite.info in the second server block - so all that's doing is redirecting to HTTPS, not changing the host.

rewrite ^ https://mysite.info$request_uri? permanent;

That'll handle the change in host as well as the change to HTTPS.

If you wanted the redirect to be protocol agnostic, a better approach would be:

rewrite ^ $scheme://mysite.info$request_uri? permanent;

On recent versions of nginx, this works as well (and should be a bit faster):

return 301 $scheme://mysite.info$request_uri;

edited Dec 18 '14 at 00:06

answered Aug 27 '12 at 23:35

Shane Madden

115,228

2

Also, according to NGiNX's documentation, it is better practice to use return 301 instead of rewrite. – tacotuesday Aug 27 '12 at 23:38
@Shane, sorry I made a copy/paste mistake. My 2nd directive is as you've written in your answer. Please see my updated question. Thoughts on why that doesn't work? – tim peterson Aug 27 '12 at 23:55
@Shane, also how use the return 301 given my 3 server{} blocks? I've just tried a couple things but get this error: invalid number of arguments in "return" directive when I try to restart my server. – tim peterson Aug 28 '12 at 00:01
@timpeterson Do you have any other server blocks? – Michael Hampton Aug 28 '12 at 00:02
none that i know of, i'm a novice as you can tell, just did the sudo apt-get install nginx /php on my ubuntu machine and now here I am, are there other files I need to look at? – tim peterson Aug 28 '12 at 00:04
I have 2 include statements in my http{} block that were there by default: include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;. Should I comment these out? – tim peterson Aug 28 '12 at 00:06

Nginx rewrite to eliminate "www" not working

1 Answers1