Force www. and https in nginx.conf (SSL)

Question

After purchasing a SSL certificate I have been trying to force all pages to secured https and to www.

https://www.exampl.com is working and secure but only if type it i

Answer 1

The best way to implement WWW and HTTPS redirection is to create a new server section in Nginx config:

server {
    listen      80;   #listen for all the HTTP requests
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    return      301         https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}

You will also have to perform https://example.com to https://www.example.com redirection. This may be done with code similar to the following:

server {
    listen              443 ssl;
    server_name         example.com;

    ssl_certificate     ssl.crt; #you have to put here...
    ssl_certificate_key ssl.key; #   ...paths to your certificate files
    return      301     https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}

And of course, you must reload Nginx config after each change. Here are some useful commands:

check for errors in the configuration:

sudo service nginx configtest

reload configuration (this would be enough to make changes "work"):

sudo service nginx reload

restart the whole webserver:

sudo service nginx restart

Important note:

All your server sections must be inside http section (or in a file included in http section):

http {
    # some directives ...
    server {
        # ...
    }
    server {
        # ...
    }
    # ...
}