Redirect HTTP Requests To HTTPS On Nginx

Introduction

This writeup shows you how to setup Nginx to redirect non-secure (http) requests to secure (https) ones.

Pre-requisites

• You have a Vultr Linux instance running Nginx.
• Your have domain name (e.g example.com) whose DNS A records for “@” and “www” are pointing to the IP of your Vultr machine above.
• Ideally you should also have SSL setup on your instance.

Setup redirect

Add an additional server block to your vhost setting so it looks similar to below:

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

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name example.com;

    ssl_certificate     /path/to/cert-crt.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /path/to/cert-key.key;
    #other site settings go here (e.g. ssl, logs, site root)
}

Written by Lami Adabonyan