How to Redirect to Non-WWW & HTTPS with Nginx (Or WWW)

John on July 15, 2021

In this tutorial, we will learn how to configure an Nginx server block to redirect all standard HTTP traffic to HTTPS and the non-www version of the site.

Prerequisites: you will need sudo access on your server and an SSL cert configured for the domain in question.

Step 1

Begin by opening the server block file for your domain in sudo mode.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

Now configure two server blocks; first will listen for HTTP requests and 301 redirect them to HTTPS. The second will listen for HTTPS requests and redirect to non-www.

server {

	listen 80;
	listen [::]:80;

	server_name www.example.com example.com;

	return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;

}


server {

	listen 443 ssl;
	listen [::]:443 ssl;

	if ($host = www.example.com) {
		return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
	}

	ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
	ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot


	server_name www.example.com example.com;

	root /var/www/example.com/public/;


	#rest of server block...

Note – using an if statement in Nginx here is safe here because it is not in a location context. Read more about Nginx configuration structure.

Redirect to WWW & HTTPS

Let's say you want to redirect all traffic to WWW you could reverse the logic like this:

server {

	listen 80;
	listen [::]:80;

	server_name www.example.com example.com;

	return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;

}


server {

	listen 443 ssl;
	listen [::]:443 ssl;

	if ($host = example.com) {
		return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
	}

	ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
	ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot


	server_name www.example.com example.com;

	root /var/www/example.com/public/;


	#rest of server block...

Test the Configuration

Now let's test the changes have no errors:

sudo nginx -t

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

Reload Nginx

For the changes to take effect, we will need to reload Nginx using systemctl like this:

sudo systemctl reload nginx