Redirect from http non-www to https www (single redirect)

Hi guys,

I’m trying to redirect http://example.com with a single 301 redirect to https://www.example.com.

While a redirect is easily achieved with some nginx configuration, here’s the problem with the nginx-proxy:

The problem When SSL is enabled (letsencrypt companion) and the non-www alias is added to the VIRTUAL_HOST and LETSENCRYPT_HOST env’s, the nginx proxy automatically creates a server block to redirect from http to https, like this:

server {
	server_name example.com;
	listen 80 ;
	access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log vhost;
	return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

So http://example.com will 301 redirect to https://example.com.

While this is neat, my website must redirect to https://www.example.com instead.

Options? I can ofcourse create a redirect in my own proxied webcontainer, that will redirect non-www requests to www, like this:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name example.com;
    rewrite ^(.*) https://www.example.com$1 permanent;
}

The problem is though, this will result in a double 301 redirect:

• http://example.com -> https://example.com (redirect by nginx-proxy)
• https://example.com -> https://www.example.com (redirect by my own webcontainer)

I want to have a single redirect (for SEO purposes)

The second thing I’ve tried is adding rewrite ^(.*) https://www.example.com$1 permanent; to /etc/nginx/vhost.d/example.com in the nginx-proxy. This will add the configuration to the “listen 443” block only, and this won’t do anything because the http to https from the nginx-proxy will still come first.

Any idea how I can fix this with a single redirect from http:// to https://www…?

Thanks in advance

[lukecyca]

It seems many of the solutions above “work” but end up using multiple redirects, which is specifically what the OP is trying to avoid.

I finally got this working with a single redirect with the following incantation:

  lukecyca.com:
    image: nginx:alpine
    restart: always
    environment:
        VIRTUAL_HOST: lukecyca.com
        LETSENCRYPT_HOST: lukecyca.com
    volumes:
      - "./var/www/lukecyca.com:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro"

  www.lukecyca.com:
    image: cusspvz/redirect
    restart: always
    environment:
        VIRTUAL_HOST: www.lukecyca.com
        HTTPS_METHOD: noredirect
        LETSENCRYPT_HOST: www.lukecyca.com
        REDIRECT: https://lukecyca.com

The piece that was missing from most other solutions in this (and other) threads was HTTPS_METHOD: noredirect which disables the first redirect by nginx-proxy and allows the container (in this case cusspvz/redirect) to do a single redirect.

lcmbp:~ luke$ curl -v http://www.lukecyca.com/foo
...
< Location: https://lukecyca.com/foo

lcmbp:~ luke$ curl -v https://www.lukecyca.com/foo
...
< location: https://lukecyca.com/foo

lcmbp:~ luke$ curl -v http://lukecyca.com/foo
...
< Location: https://lukecyca.com/foo

lcmbp:~ luke$ curl -v https://lukecyca.com/foo
...
[serves site]

[adamkdean]

In case it helps anyone, I created https://github.com/adamkdean/redirect to make this easier.

version: '2'

services:
  nginx-proxy:
    image: jwilder/nginx-proxy
    ports:
      - 80:80
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro

  redirect:
    image: adamkdean/redirect
    environment:
      - VIRTUAL_HOST=example.com
      - REDIRECT_LOCATION="http://www.example.com"
      - REDIRECT_STATUS_CODE=301

  example:
    image: example
    environment:
      - VIRTUAL_HOST=www.example.com