Simple nginx redirect doesn't match

Question

I was originally trying to do a complicated URL rewrite which I couldn't get working, so stripped it back to a simple URL redirect which should definitely work, instead it throws a 404.

Requests for [any_scheme]://www.mydomain.com/google should redirect to https://www.google.com/

nginx.conf (not posted as it contains no server blocks so can't conflict?)

mydomain.com.conf:

server {
    server_name www.mydomain.com;
    root /home/mydomain/public_html;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;

    ssl_certificate /home/mydomain/ssl.combined;
    ssl_certificate_key /home/mydomain/ssl.key;

    access_log /var/log/virtualmin/mydomain.com_access_log;
    error_log /var/log/virtualmin/mydomain.com_error_log;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
    }

    location = /google {
        return 302 https://www.google.com/;
    }

    #rogue .htaccess files caught here
    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

#force non-www. to www.
server {
    server_name mydomain.com;
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;
    return 301 $scheme://www.mydomain.com$request_uri;
}

@DanilaVershinin Yep, with every change. Something must be conflicting elsewhere as this config is as clean as they come I think — Jon, Mar 06 '19 at 09:35
Is there an access log entry corresponding to this 404 response? — Richard Smith, Mar 06 '19 at 09:51
x.x.x.x - - [06/Mar/2019:01:45:39 +0000] "GET /google/ HTTP/1.1" 404 193 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.1.2; Swift 2 X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3626.76 Mobile Safari/537.36" — Jon, Mar 06 '19 at 10:24
I wonder if any other location from `www.mydomain.com` works? Did you check? — Alexander Azarov, Mar 14 '19 at 09:50

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 06 '19 at 10:52

0

Based on your log entry: you are requesting /google/ (note the trailing slash), but this will not match up with /google location because there is no trailing slash there.

So you need two exact match locations:

location = /google {
    return 302 https://www.google.com/;
}

location = /google/ {
    return 302 https://www.google.com/;
}

answered Mar 06 '19 at 10:52

Danila Vershinin

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Sorry, my log file line was incorrect, I had been testing with and without slash and posted the wrong line. Even with the slash in the rule and testing slash in URL I get same response. Is there another way I can trace the problem? – Jon Mar 06 '19 at 11:44

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 14 '19 at 14:50

Use curl -v to debug what's going on with your server.
Do you use sites-available / sites-enabled? Don't. See https://serverfault.com/a/870709/110020. The sites-available / sites-enabled is non-standard and is evil, don't use it, use conf.d instead.
Make sure you actually reload nginx. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/21297545/1122270. Try sudo nginx -s reload and sudo pkill -HUP nginx directly.
Check both error_log as well as access_log. Make sure the dates of events match the new requests that you're making. I'd recommend opening several terminal windows, and doing a tail -f in each, then doing a few return presses to separate new input from the old one, only then doing the requests.
Are you using any extra proxies on top of nginx? Those might be the cause of the problem.

Thanks, I *think* `sudo nginx -s reload` did the trick. I have been using `systemctl reload nginx` which I believe is basically the same thing, so not sure *why* it worked this time but it did. I will also take your advice on `sites-enabled`. For the record I'm using a Digital Ocean image of Ubuntu 16.04 LEMP. Thanks again. — Jon, Mar 14 '19 at 16:02

Simple nginx redirect doesn't match

2 Answers2