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sslnginxhttpsdnsdnsimple

Nginx redirect http://www and naked http/https to https://www

I would like to redirect all traffic from the following domains:

  • http://domain.com
  • http://www.domain.com
  • https://domain.com

to

  • https://www.domain.com

I have a SSL certificate for the above domain. It hosts a Rails app, served by Passenger.

To accomplish the naked domain redirect, I've set up an URL redirect in my DNSimple account:

URL domain.com  3600  https://www.domain.com

My server blocks are as follows (Inspired by Nginx no-www to www and www to no-www amongst others):

server {
    listen          80;
    listen          443;
    server_name     domain.com;

    ssl                             on;
    ssl_certificate                 /etc/ssl/domain-ssl.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key             /etc/ssl/domain.key;
    ssl_session_timeout             5m;
    ssl_protocols                   SSLv2 SSLv3 TLSv1;
    ssl_ciphers                     HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers       on;

    server_tokens   off;
    access_log      /dev/null;
    error_log       /dev/null;

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

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

    root                            /home/deploy/app/current/public;
    passenger_enabled               on;
    passenger_app_env               production;
    passenger_set_cgi_param         HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO https;

    ssl                             on;
    ssl_certificate                 /etc/ssl/domain-ssl.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key             /etc/ssl/domain.key;
    ssl_session_timeout             5m;
    ssl_protocols                   SSLv2 SSLv3 TLSv1;
    ssl_ciphers                     HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers       on;
}

passenger_pre_start https://www.domain.com;

What works:

  • naked domain gets redirected to secure https://www
  • http://www domain gets redirected to secure https://www
  • https:// www works

What does't:

  • Naked https:// doesn't work, browsers throws a server not found

Basically I want to redirect all traffic to the secure https://www.domain.com. What am I missing here?

Solution

  • If you don't have a certificate for domain.com redirecting from https://domain.com to https://www.domain.com will not work, because before the browser gets the redirect it has to successfully establish the SSL connection (https is http inside SSL) and this fails because the certificate does not match.