nginx redirect http to https not working

Question

I am trying to reroute from http to https. For example you visit example.com and you will be automatically redirected to https://example.com.

I tryed using this one:

server {
      listen         80;
      return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
} 

as well as this one:

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

as found here : In Nginx, how can I rewrite all http requests to https while maintaining sub-domain?

But neither of seem are wokring for me. I am staying on example.com.

Anyone got an idea?

Answer 1

You haven't defined a server name for your host.

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

otherwise your host is not called. When you look to the example you can see that there is a server name defined in both cases.

Answer 2

I had a similar fault. Instead of redirecting the page kept 404.

Turned out to be a conflict between the configurations.

My config were put in /etc/nginx/conf.d/. What I did not notice was that in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ a default config was located which also listened on port 80 wich had higher precenednce than my conf in conf.d. Simply by removing the default config resolved my issue and the redirect worked properly.

Answer 3

Your second example will work for any requests going to http://example.com, however remember that www.example.com and example.com are different so if you needed to redirect for anything at example.com you could do

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

or else redirect for each host, i.e.

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

Make sure you both test the config via nginx -t and reload the configuration when you make changes via a nginx reload. You can test what your getting via either live http headers or curl

The below output is what I see when trying a http header request to a domain that we direct to https with the exact server block above.

$ curl -I -L http://host.domain.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.6.2
Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2015 03:26:39 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 184
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://host.domain.com/

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.6.2
Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2015 03:26:41 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.22
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=dca72682392e7ac96d4b7703ea7a1eb1; path=/; domain=domain.com; secure; HttpOnly
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=c910822f8007fe8c0424715a24aa4728; path=/; domain=domain.com; secure; HttpOnly