How to redirect HTTP to HTTPS in Nginx

Nginx, pronounced "Engine x", is a free, open source, Linux-based high-performance web and reverse proxy server responsible for managing and handling the load of the largest website traffic on the Internet. Nginx is a powerful redirection tool that can be easily configured on your system to redirect insecure or unencrypted HTTP web traffic to encrypted and secure HTTPS web servers. If you are a system administrator or developer, then you should often use Nginx server.

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In this article, we will look at how to redirect web traffic from HTTP to secure HTTPS in Nginx. HTTP message headers are transmitted in a plain text string format, while HTTPS uses SSL/TLS to encrypt the communication between the client and server systems. Therefore, HTTPS should replace HTTP for many reasons:

• All data in both directions between client and server is encrypted. However, if intercepted, no one can access sensitive information.
• When you use HTTPS, Google Chrome and other browsers assume your website domain is secure.
• The HTTPS version uses the HTTP/2 protocol to improve the performance of the website you specify.
• If you serve your website domain over HTTPS, the website will rank higher on Google as it prefers all websites that are secured with HTTPS.
• It is best to redirect traffic HTTP to HTTPS in Nginx in a separate server block for each site version. It is also recommended to avoid redirecting traffic using the "if" direction, which may cause unexpected server behavior.

Redirect all traffic from HTTP to HTTPS

Add the following changes to your Nginx configuration file in order to redirect all traffic from HTTP to the HTTPS version:

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

Below, we explain each of the above terms in detail:

• Listen 80 default_server - This will instruct your system to capture all HTTP traffic on port 80
• Server_name _ - Order in which it is matched after receiving a request
• Return 301 https://$host$request_uri - This tells your search engine to redirect it permanently. It specifies that the variable $host holds the domain name.

After changing the configuration settings, you need to reload the Nginx service on your system. So, reload the Nginx service with the following command:

 $ sudo systemctl reload nginx

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS for a specified domain name in Nginx

After installing the SSL certificate on your domain, you will have two server block options for this domain name. One block is for the HTTP version listening on port 80, and the second version is for HTTPS listening on port 443. However, to redirect a website domain from HTTP to HTTPS, you need to open the Nginx configuration. You can find this configuration file in the /etc/nginx/sites-available directory. If you do not find this file, you can search for it in /etc/nginx/nginx, /usr/local/nginx/conf or /usr/local/etc/nginx and then perform the following changes in this file:

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

Let's understand the above code line by line.

• Listen 80 - Using port 80, the server will listen for all incoming connections to the specified domain name.
• Server_name linuxmi.com www.linuxmi.com – It specifies the domain name. So, replace it with the domain name of the website you want to redirect.
• Return 301 https://linuxmi.com$request_uri - Moves traffic to the HTTPS version of the site.
• The $request_uri variable is used for the full original request URI, which also includes parameters.

Using the following method, you can redirect traffic to the HTTPS www version to the non-www version of your site. For both non-www and www versions, it is recommended to create redirects in separate server blocks. Let's explain this with an example. If you want to redirect www HTTPS requests to the non-www version, you should follow the following configuration:

 server {
 listen 80;
    server_name linuxmi.com www.linuxmi.com;
    return 301 https://linuxmi.com$request_uri;
 }
 server {
 listen 443 ssl http2;
    server_name www.linuxmi.com;
 # . . . other code
    return 301 https://linuxmi.com$request_uri;
 }
 server {
 listen 443 ssl http2;
 server_name linuxmi.com; 
 
 # . . . other code
 }

Replace domain name with your domain name, for example www.linuxmi.com.

Summarize

We have discussed how to redirect traffic from HTTP version to HTTPS on Nginx server. By changing the Nginx configuration file settings, you can easily redirect specific domains or all to HTTPS. This method we mentioned in this article can make your website more secure by changing the user experience.