Rewriting URLs with Nginx

Summary

In my post HTTPS for Multiple domains using GitHub pages, I was originally using a HTML file with a meta redirect. While this technique does work, I discovered a very annoying flaw. Anyone that had an old, or non-ssl link was redirected to the home page instead of the page or post they wanted. This isn’t a delightful experience so I started doing some research to find a better path.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to redirect without breaking the links. Nginx refers to this as url rewriting. They have a handy post on creating rewrite rules that I followed to fix my issue.

I removed the root, index, and location sections of my nginx config and replaced it with a config similar to this:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name old-name www.old-name.com;
    return 301 $scheme://new-name.com$request_uri;
}

Note: I did change $scheme from the last line to https as I want to force SSL for all the sites.

Closing

While these aren’t step-by-step directions, hopefully it’s enough for someone else to solve the same problem I had. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact me: @jamesmassardo