What is causing this 301 redirect?

Question

I have a problem with my server redirecting http://www.mylesgray.com:8080/ -> http://www.mylesgray.com/.

Here are my Nginx default and fastcgi_params config files:

https://gist.github.com/1745271

https://gist.github.com/1745313

This is rather a nusance as I am trying to run a benchmark of Nginx w/ caching vs Varnish w/ caching on top of Nginx to see if there is any performance benefit of one over the other.

As such I have straight Nginx w/ caching listening on port 8080 and varnish on port 80 which forwards any non-cached requests to Nginx on localhost:8080, so obviously what I want to do is run an ab benchmark on http://www.mylesgray.com:8080/ and on http://www.mylesgray.com/ to see the difference.

Here are the results of curl -I on various addresses.

# curl -I http://www.mylesgray.com:8080

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/0.7.65
Date: Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:07:34 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2-1ubuntu4.7ppa5~lucid1
X-Pingback: http://www.mylesgray.com/xmlrpc.php
Location: http://www.mylesgray.com/

# curl -I http://mylesgray.com

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/0.7.65
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2-1ubuntu4.7ppa5~lucid1
X-Pingback: http://www.mylesgray.com/xmlrpc.php
Location: http://www.mylesgray.com/
Content-Length: 0
Date: Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:15:51 GMT
X-Varnish: 1419774165 1419774163
Age: 15
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive

# curl -I http://mylesgray.com:8080

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/0.7.65
Date: Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:16:08 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2-1ubuntu4.7ppa5~lucid1
X-Pingback: http://www.mylesgray.com/xmlrpc.php
Location: http://www.mylesgray.com/

Then running curl -I http://www.mylesgray.com gives:

# curl -I http://www.mylesgray.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.7.65
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2-1ubuntu4.7ppa5~lucid1
X-Pingback: http://www.mylesgray.com/xmlrpc.php
Content-Length: 5132
Date: Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:07:29 GMT
X-Varnish: 1419774133 1419774124
Age: 30
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive

So as you can see 80 is served by Varnish and 8080 by Nginx but I cannot find anywhere anything that does a 301 redirect, not in nginx.conf or in the sites-enabled/default file and I don't believe it is caused by Wordpress itself but an very much open to correction.

Please help, this is driving me nuts!

Myles

Answer 1

The presence of an X-Powered-By: PHP header means that wordpress is issuing the 301. It's due to wordpress forcing www.mylesgray.com. When you use a nonstandard port, user agents will generally include the port in the Host: header. Try adding

fastcgi_param HTTP_HOST $host;

with the rest of your fastcgi_param directives (or alog with your "include fastcgi_params;") and it should fix this.