How Nginx redirects HTTP to HTTPS

Nginx is a powerful redirection tool that can be easily configured to redirect insecure or unencrypted HTTP web traffic to encrypted and secure HTTPS web servers on your system.

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

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 clear 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:

1. All data in both directions between client-server is encrypted. However, if intercepted, no one can access sensitive information.

2. When you use HTTPS, Google Chrome and other browsers will consider your website domain to be secure.

3. The HTTPS version improves the performance of your specified website using the HTTP/2 protocol.

4. If you serve your website domain over HTTPS, the website will rank higher on Google because it favors all HTTPS-protected websites.

5. 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 erratic server behavior.

Redirect all traffic from HTTP to HTTPS

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

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

Below, we detail each of the above terms:

1. Listen 80 default_server – This will instruct your system to capture all HTTP traffic on port 80




2. Server_name _ – matching sequence after receiving the request




3. Return 301 https://$host$request_uri – This tells your search engines to redirect it permanently. It specifies the variable $host to hold the domain name.

After changing the configuration settings, the Nginx service needs to be reloaded on the system. So, reload the Nginx service using the following command:

$ sudo systemctl reload nginx

Redirect HTTP for a specified domain name to HTTPS 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 don't find this file, you can search for it /etc/nginx/nginx./usr/local/nginx/conf or /usr/local/etc/nginx and 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 go through the above code line by line.

1. Listen 80 – Using port 80, the server will listen for all incoming connections for the specified domain name.




2. 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.




3. Return 301 https://linuxmi.com$request_uri – Move traffic to the HTTPS version of the site.




4. The $request_uri variable is used for the complete original request URI, which also contains parameters.

Using the following method, you can redirect traffic from the HTTPS www version to the non-www version of your site. For non-www and www versions, it is recommended to create redirects in separate server blocks. Let us explain with an example. If you want to redirect www HTTPS requests to a 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 the domain name with your domain name, for example www.linuxmi.com.

By changing the Nginx configuration file settings, you can easily redirect a specific domain name or all to HTTPS. The approach we've mentioned in this article can make your website more secure by changing the user experience.

The above is the detailed content of How Nginx redirects HTTP to HTTPS. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!