Setting up SSL with nginx including redirects from non HTTPS traffic

Common nginx configuration

Before upgrading I had the basic server configuration as follows:

server {
listen 80;
server_name www.endyourif.com;
# remainder of regular server setup
}

The above is just a subset of the server configuration as there is much more configuration to point to root directories and all of that jazz.

Setting nginx SSL Configuration

To change this to SSL, I changed the above setup as follows:

server {
listen 443;
server_name www.endyourif.com;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /link/to/my/endyourif.cert;
ssl_certificate_key /link/to/my/endyourif.key;
# remainder of regular server setup
}

In the above example you will need to change the ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key to where the files are located on your server.

As a final step, I wanted to ensure that all of my traffic always go to SSL. To accomplish this I added the following additional server config:

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

The following config will redirect any traffic to http://endyourif.com or http://www.endyourif.com to https://www.endyourif.com. The end part $request_uri ensures that it redirects the visitor to the same page they are currently on.

Redirecting non-www to www with SSL

And finally I also want https://endyourif.com to go to https://www.endyourif.com, so I added one additional server config as follows:

server {
listen 443;
server_name endyourif.com;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /link/to/my/endyourif.cert;
ssl_certificate_key /link/to/my/endyourif.key;
return 301 https://www.endyourif.com$request_uri;
}

I slightly learned the hard way with this last configuration that I had to include the same ssl information that I used in the original server configuration. I wrongly assumed that the redirect would happen immediately. Instead nginx served up my default ssl certificate which did not match this domain.

Published on Feb 6, 2019

Tags: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) | Optimization | nginx | ssl