Redirect HTTP to HTTPS with NGINX - nginx

Question

I have a couple of applications that I maintain at my work and noticed that some employees are able to use the non-secure paths to those applications such as: example.com, www.example.com. Using either of those paths will direct them to the HTTP path instead of HTTPS, unless they specify HTTPS in the url. We currently use nginx as our gateway, but I did not do the initial configuration of our nginx gateway, so I don't really know what works and what doesn't.
Here is a snippet of our nginx.conf file
server{
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server;
server_name localhost;
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
}
}
# Settings for a TLS enabled server.
server {
listen 443 ssl http2 default_server;
listen [::]:443 ssl http2 default_server;
server_name localhost;
ssl_certificate "/etc/nginx/ssl/domain-crt.txt";
ssl_certificate_key "/etc/nginx/ssl/domain-key.txt";
ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
## More configuration below this...
}
I tried doing a return in the listen 80 section but this did not work:
server{
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server;
server_name localhost;
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
}
}
I reloaded nginx with the corrections and I was still able to connect to the http paths without it redirecting to https. I don't know if this has something to do with the server_name being localhost because I've only seen examples online where they are redirecting to the actual domain name, but this is how our applications are setup and I don't know if changing that will have effects on the connectivity of our applications. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions on how I could get a redirect to work properly, that would be great. Thanks!

Answer 1

You're missing the semicolon at the end, also you should get rid of the proxy_pass since that overrides the behavior.
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server;
server_name localhost;
location / {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}
}