I recently made the transition from running my web server on Apache to running it on Nginx. Well, I made the switch at the start of the summer, but only now is my Nginx configuration stable. One of the biggest obstacles I encountered trying to get Nginx to do what I want was a lack of documentation. The official documentation is anemic and I found examples hard to come by. So now I'd like to share parts of my nginx.conf file that cover some common use cases that I found frustrating to implement.

I would like all of the URLs for ericw.ca to be without the "www." prefix. Indeed, that is their canonical form. This configuration snippet uses the 301 Moved Permanently status to redirect users arriving at "www.ericw.ca" to "ericw.ca".

server {
    server_name www.ericw.ca;
    rewrite ^(.*) http://ericw.ca$1 permanent;
}

server {
    server_name ericw.ca;
    # The rest of the configuration...
}

You can see this in action if you go to www.ericw.ca.