VestaCP - how to to redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS on the Nginx web server

Question

I am using the VestaCP control panel on my VPS. Using the .htaccess file, I was able to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS on the Apache server, but Nginx does not support it. How can I redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS on the Nginx web server?

Answer 1

If you have root priviledges, access your VPS using root. If you have installed any certificate (e.g. letsencrypt) for your domain, there should be two .conf files in the folder /home/USER_NAME/conf/web for your domain. Make the following changes in those two files.

File1: your_domain.nginx.conf

Add the line: "return 301 https://$host$request_uri;". This will redirect all HTTP traffics to HTTPS.

server {
    listen    a.b.c.d:80;
    server_name YOUR_SERVER_NAME ;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;

File2: your_domain.nginx.ssl.conf

If you want to enable HTTP2 on your server, add 'ssl http2' after 443.

server {
    listen    a.b.c.d:443 ssl http2;