Nginx vhost redirects with and without location.

Nginx is a very good Web servers which is fast and highly customizable. Following are the few redirects used in daily work.

A simple vhost with HTTP and HTTPS configuration.

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name testsite.domain.com;
  root /data/html/;
  index index.html index.htm;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/testsite.domain.com_access.log;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/testsite.domain.com_error.log;
  include /etc/nginx/denyhost.conf; 
}

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name testsite.domain.com;
  root /data/html/;
  index index.html index.htm;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/testsite.domain.com_access.log;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/testsite.domain.com_error.log;
  include /etc/nginx/denyhost.conf;
}

listen : Its for port on which you want web server to listen, 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS.
server_name : For domain name to be hosted.
root : Its the location of sites document directory.
index : For pages which need to be rendered first.
access_log & error_log : for sites logs.
include : To include any file in vhost.

A simple redirecting vhost.

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name support.domain.com;
  return 301 https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us;
}

server {
  listen 443;
  server_name support.domain.com;
  return 301 https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us;
}

This will redirect all the requests coming to support.domain.com to https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us.

To allow specific files to miss the cache and fetch content from server following rule can be helpful.

####To solve the font awesome icon issue on FireFox and IE
location ~* \.(eot|otf|ttf|woff|woff2)$ {
    add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *;
}

To add specific headers to all the files.

location / {
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS, PUT, DELETE';
add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'DNT,X-Mx-ReqToken,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type';
}

Redirect everything followed by character or directory.

location /a {
   rewrite ^/a /b/ permanent;
 }

It will redirect everything followed by /a to /b/. For example /a, /abc, /aabb/ etc.

Redirect only a specific character to other.

location = /a {
  return 301 /b/;
}

It will only redirect the /a to /b/, anything followed /a will not be redirected.

Redirect multiple URL's to single URL.

location ~ ^/(sign-up|sign-in) {
return 301 https://domain.com;
}

It will redirect the sign-up and sign-in to https://domain.com.

Redirect passing the relative path to redirected URL.

rewrite ^/ab/(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 permanent;

It will pass the exact path after /ab/ to the destination URL.

Redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS.

###To redirect requests from http to https
if ($http_x_forwarded_proto != 'https') {
      rewrite ^(.*) https://$host$1 permanent;
    }