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How to remove "www" and redirect to "http" to "https" on Nginx webserver

The best way to accomplish this is using three server blocks as follow:

1. Redirect default http to https
2. Redirect https www to https non-www
3. Actual handle requests https

The reason for using extra server blocks instead of "if" directive is that server selection is performed using a hash table, and is very fast. Using a server-level "if" directive means, its run for every request, which is wasteful. Also, capturing the requested uri in the rewrite is wasteful, as Nginx already has this information in the $uri and $request_uri variables (without and with query string, respectively).

# Redirect default http to https

server {
    listen      80;
    server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;

        return 301 https://yourdomain.com$request_uri;
}


# Redirect https://www to https://

server {
        listen 443 ssl;
        ssl_certificate /path/to/server.cert;
        ssl_certificate_key /path/to/server.key;
        server_name www.yourdomain.com;

        return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}


# Actual handling https requests (without www - default) eg., https://yourdomain.com

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    ssl_certificate /path/to/server.cert;
    ssl_certificate_key /path/to/server.key;
    server_name yourdomain.com;

        (add the rest of processing requests)
}

 

If you want to include www, you will only need two server blocks for port 80 and port 443 SSL as follow:

 

# http to https

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;

    return 301 https://www.yourdomain.com$request_uri;
}


# Actual handling https requests (with www - default) eg., https://www.yourdomain.com

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;

    # SSL managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/yourdomain.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/yourdomain.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot

    # Redirect non-https traffic to https
    if ($scheme != "https") {
    return 301 https://www.yourdomain.com$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot
}

 

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