How to forward all requests to www subdomain including https requests? - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a VPS with a Rails 4 application running on Ubuntu, NginX and Unicorn.
As I want all pages to be SSL encrypted, all requests to http:// are forwarded to https:// which is working fine.
This is an excerpt of my NginX configuration:
http {
....
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
rewrite ^ https://$server_name$request_uri? permanent;
}
server {
listen 443;
server_name example.com;
root /home/rails/public;
index index.htm index.html;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/example.com.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/example.com.key;
location / {
try_files $uri/index.html $uri.html $uri #app;
}
location #app {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_pass http://app_server;
}
}
}
How can I make it that all requests to http://example.com and https://example.com are forwarded to https://www.example.com?
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

We use this in apache2:
<VirtualHost *80>
ServerName frontlineutilities.co.uk
ServerAlias www.frontlineutilities.co.uk
</VirtualHost>
Docs
Having researched how you'd achieve this in Nginx, I found this:
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.org www.example.org;
...
}
--
Capturing Requests
The reason I wrote this as an answer is because your choice is whether to use Middleware or the web server itself
Although I don't know the specifics, I do know that adding to the Rails middleware will eventually lead to bloat. I am a firm proponent of modular programming - and will gladly separate functionality into different parts of the stack
The problem you have is not really a rails one - it's a server issue (how to route all requests to www.). I would therefore highly recommend you focus on the server to get it sorted. As in the end, the sever is there to capture requests to your server IP & route them accordingly
I would start with the resources above & work to redirect in the server. It doesn't matter to rails whether you send a request to www. or the standard domain

Answer 2

If you are looking to setup which redirects http://example.com or https://example.com to http://www.example.com and https://www.example.com
The following should do the redirect
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) https://www.example.com$request_uri permanent;
}
server {
listen 443;
server_name example.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) https://www.example.com$request_uri permanent;
}
Also you have change your original server_name to www.example.com
Hope this helps.