Question

How to 301 redirect from www to non-www using nginx as reverse-proxy for node.js app?

Posted on February 21, 2020
Ubuntu 18.04 Nginx
Asked by jimmydeal16

I am trying to 301 redirect https://www.tankienews.com to https://tankienews.com without any extreme modifications to the nginx setup in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/tankienews.com, but have been unable to get the redirect working.

Wasn’t trying to rewrite the whole file as I don’t do too much work on the actual nginx side, so don’t want to risk breaking the site.

I have the domain info setup correctly on digital ocean as I can access both www and non-www version of my site.

Current server setup is:

server {

        root /var/www/tankienews.com/html;
        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

        server_name tankienews.com www.tankienews.com;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
    }

    listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on; # managed by Certbot
    listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/tankienews.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/tankienews.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot


}
server {
    if ($host = www.tankienews.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot


    if ($host = tankienews.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot


        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;

        server_name tankienews.com www.tankienews.com;
    return 404; # managed by Certbot




}

Things I have tried:

Changing the return 301 info for if($host = www.tankienews.com) to the host name for the non-www version as such:

 if ($host = www.tankienews.com) {
        return 301 https://tankienews.com$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot

Also have tried adding a new server block for servername www.tankienews.com, but neither of these seemed to redirect www.tankienews.com to tankienews.com when I restarted nginx and then tested in my browser.

Sorry if this is a simple question, but I’ve searched the tutorials (solution in the tutorial for Ubuntu 14.04 didn’t work when I tested it) and the solutions for similar questions also didn’t work when I tested. It’s possible I’m not implementing these solutions correctly, but I followed the instructions in the responses.

Please let me know what the simplest fix to get this working would be. I will continue testing alternative methods and update if I find a solution.

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• February 23, 2020

Accepted Answer

Hi there @jimmydeal16,

Have you tried following the steps from this tutorial here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-redirect-www-to-non-www-with-nginx-on-centos-7

Basically it suggests creating a separate server block and using the following

server {
    server_name www.example.com;
    return 301 $scheme://example.com$request_uri;
}

What you currently have in your port 80 server block is good enough, in your case as you have an SSL certificate, you might have to add one more server block for https://www redirect to https:// only:

server {
    listen              443 ssl;
    server_name         www.yourdomain.com;
    ssl_certificate     /path/to/certificate.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /path/to/private/key.pem;
    ssl_protocols       TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
    return              301 https://yourdomain.com$request_uri;
}

Hope that this helps! Let me know how it goes. Regards, Bobby