How to redirect www to non-www with Nginx

When you have a website or web application behind a domain, then your users can access your website by the domain name and the www sub domain.

For example, this website is accessible through https://driesdeboosere.dev (without www sub domain) and https://www.driesdeboosere.dev (with www sub domain).

When a user goes to https://www.driesdeboosere.dev then that user will be redirected to https://driesdeboosere.dev (_without the www _).

To achieve this on a Nginx server you'll need to do the following:

Configure DNS

In order to set up this redirect, www.driesdeboosere.dev to driesdeboosere.dev or visa versa, you must have an A record for the domain (driesdeboosere.dev) and an A record for the sub domain (www.driesdeboosere.dev).

• Create an A record for your domain name (e.g. driesdeboosere.dev) and set the IP address to the public IP address of your Nginx server (e.g. 165.22.205.49).
• Next, add another A record for your sub domain (e.g. www.driesdeboosere.dev) and specify the same IP address.

It should look something like this:

Now your servers is accessible by the www and non-www domain, but we still need to configure the redirect. That's the next step.

Configure Nginx redirect

We can do two redirects, a 301 or a 302 redirect. Learn about the difference between the two.

In our case, we want a permanent 301 redirect, so that all traffic through www.driesdeboosere.dev redirects to driesdeboosere.dev. We'll setup a new Nginx server block that points to your original server block.

• Login to your server
• Enter following command:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/redirect.conf

Depending on which direction you want to redirect, use one of the two options below.

Option 1: Redirect www to non-www

If you want to redirect your users from www to non-www domain, insert following configuration in the editor:

server {
    server_name www.driesdeboosere.dev;
    return 301 $scheme://driesdeboosere.dev$request_uri;
}

Save and exit.

To make the changes take effect, restart Nginx by entering following command:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Test your redirect in the browser; entering www.driesdeboosere.dev will redirect to driesdeboosere.dev.

We can test this with a curl command, enter following in PowerShell:

curl -I www.driesdeboosere.dev

You should get a 301 Moved Permanently response like this:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2021 13:04:32 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 194
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://driesdeboosere.dev/

Option 2: Redirect non-www to www

If you want to redirect your users from non-www to www domain, insert following configuration in the editor:

server {
    server_name driesdeboosere.dev;
    return 301 $scheme://www.driesdeboosere.dev$request_uri;
}

Save and exit.

To make the changes take effect, restart Nginx by entering following command:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Test your redirect in the browser; entering driesdeboosere.dev will redirect to www.driesdeboosere.dev.

We can test this with a curl command, enter following in PowerShell:

curl -I driesdeboosere.dev

You should get a 301 Moved Permanently response like this:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2021 13:04:32 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 194
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://www.driesdeboosere.dev/

Conclusion

That’s it! Your Nginx permanent redirect is now configured properly, and your users will be able to access your web server via your non-www and www domain.

Difference between a permanent and temporary redirect

301 redirect (Permanent)

A 301 redirect is an permanent redirect. This way we inform search engines and browsers that a page is permanent redirected to a new address. The old address will be removed from the search engines and be replaced by the new address.

302 redirect (Temporary)

A 302 redirect is an temporary redirect. This way we inform search engines and browsers that a page is temporary redirected to a new address.