Nginx Redirects With Query String Arguments
Warning: This post is over a year old. I don't always update old posts with new information, so some of this information may be out of date.
This is an example of how my Nginx configuration looked to redirect from an old
domain to a new one, and also to redirect from the root example.com domain to
the canonical www subdomain.
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
server_name my-old-domain.com;
server_name www.my-old-domain.com;
return 301 https://www.example.com$uri;
}
It also redirects the URI value, e.g. from http://example.com/test to
http://example.com/test, but I noticed recently though that any the query
string would be lost - e.g. http://example.com/?test would redirect to
http://www.example.com and the ?test would be dropped. The application that
I built references images based on the query string, so I wanted these to be
included within the redirect.
This was fixed by making a small change to my return statement.
Before:
return 301 https://www.example.com$uri;
After:
return 301 https://www.example.com$uri$is_args$args;
$is_args is an empty string if there are no arguments, or a ? to signify the
start of the query string. $args then adds the arguments ($query_string
could also be used with the same result).
Here is an demo of it working on this website:
