---
title: "How To Redirect www To non-www And Vice Versa with Nginx"
url: "https://bosnadev.com/2015/06/26/how-to-redirect-www-to-non-www-and-vice-versa-with-nginx"
author: "Mirza Pašić"
date: "2015-06-26"
topic: "Server administration"
tags: ["nginx", "redirects", "configuration"]
summary: "Permanent 301 redirects from non-www to www and from www to non-www in an Nginx server block, testing the config with nginx -t and checking with curl."
---

# How To Redirect www To non-www And Vice Versa with Nginx

> Outdated: Written in 2015. Versions, APIs and advice may have changed since.

In this short tutorial I’ll show you how to make permanent redirect from a _www_ URL to _non-www_ and vice versa. I’ll assume that you have superuser privileges, sudo or root access and **Nginx** already configured, as well as DNS records. More specifically, you need to have an A records for www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com .

## Redirect non-www to www

To redirect users from a plain, _non-www_ domain to a _www_ domain, you need to add this snippet in your **Nginx** domain configuration file:

```
server {
    server_name    yourdomain.com
    return         301 http://www.yourdomain.com$request_uri;
}
```
 

Save your configuration and exit. Before restarting Nginx make sure to test your configuration:

```bash terminal
root@secure:~# nginx -t
```
 

You should have something like this as output:

```bash terminal
root@secure:~# nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
```
 

Now when everything is checked you can restart Nginx:

```bash terminal
root@secure:~# service nginx restart
```
 

Now, if you curl your plain domain, you should get a 301 Moved Permanently response:

```bash terminal
root@secure:~# curl -I yourdomain.dev
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.8.0
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2015 08:36:15 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 184
Connection: keep-alive
Location: http://www.yourdomain.dev/
```
 

## Redirect www to non-www

In the previous example you saw how to redirect users from a plain _non-ww_ domain to a _www_ domain. However, if you want to redirect from a _www_ to a plain _non-www_ domain you need to add following snippet in your domain configuration file:

```
server {
        server_name www.yourdomain.com;
        return 301 $scheme://yourdomain.com$request_uri;
}
```
 

After any change in **Nginx** configuration files you should test it for syntax errors:

```bash terminal
root@secure:~# nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
```
 

And if you curl the _www_ domain you should get same 301 Moved Permanently response:

```bash terminal
root@secure:~# curl -I www.yourdomain.dev
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.8.0
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2015 08:52:26 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 184
Connection: keep-alive
Location: http://yourdomain.dev/
```
 

And that’s it. You have properly configured permanent redirect.

##### References:

[NGINX 301 Redirects](<https://web.archive.org/web/20151224173122/http://jeffsebring.com/2012/10/25/nginx-301-redirects/>)

[Nginx rewrite non-www-prefixed domain to www-prefixed domain](<https://stackoverflow.com/a/15517045/975850>)

[Nginx config for www to non-www and non-www to www redirection](<https://rtcamp.com/tutorials/nginx/www-non-www-redirection/>)

[How To Redirect www to Non-www with Nginx on CentOS 7](<https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-redirect-www-to-non-www-with-nginx-on-centos-7>)