How to force or redirect to SSL in nginx?

To force or redirect all incoming traffic to SSL (HTTPS) in Nginx, you can use a server block that handles HTTP requests on port 80 and redirect them to HTTPS. Here's an example configuration:

1. Open your Nginx configuration file for your site (commonly found at /etc/nginx/sites-available/yoursite or /etc/nginx/nginx.conf).
2. Add or modify a server block to handle HTTP traffic and redirect it to HTTPS. Here's an example:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;

    # Redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS
    return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

This configuration block listens on port 80 for HTTP traffic and uses the return 301 directive to perform a permanent (301) redirect to the HTTPS version of the same URL. Make sure to replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name.

1. Save the changes and exit the configuration file.
2. After making changes, reload Nginx to apply the new configuration:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

This will reload the Nginx configuration, and all incoming HTTP requests to http://yourdomain.com or http://www.yourdomain.com will be automatically redirected to their HTTPS counterparts.

Remember to have the HTTPS server block also set up to handle requests on port 443 with SSL configured properly for this to work effectively.

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