How To Create Temporary and Permanent Redirects with Nginx

Introduction #

HTTP redirection is way to point one domain or address to another. There are a few different kinds of redirects, each of which mean something different to the client browser. The two most common types are temporary redirects and permanent redirects.
Temporary redirects (response status code 302 Found) are useful if a URL temporarily needs to be served from a different location. For example, if you are performing site maintenance, you may wish to use a temporary redirect from your domain to an explanation page to inform your visitors that you will be back shortly.
Permanent redirects (response status code 301 Moved Permanently), on the other hand, inform the browser that it should forget the old address completely and not attempt to access it anymore. These are useful when your content has been permanently moved to a new location, such as when you change domain names.
This guide will cover a more in depth explanation of how to implement each kind of redirect in Nginx, and go through some examples for specific use cases.

Prerequisites #

To follow this tutorial, you will need:

A server with Nginx installed and set up to serve your website(s). You can find some examples and instructions on the tutorials for Ubuntu 22.04, Debian, or CentOS.

Solution at a Glance #

In Nginx, you can accomplish most redirects with the built-in rewrite directive. This directive is available by default on a fresh Nginx installation and can be used to create both temporary and permanent redirects. In its simplest form, it takes at least two arguments: the old URL and the new URL.
You can implement a temporary redirect with the following lines in your server configuration:
Temporary redirect with rewrite

server {
    . . .
    server_name www.domain1.com;
    rewrite ^/$ http://www.domain2.com redirect;
    . . .
}

This redirect instructs the browser to direct all requests for www.domain1.com to www.domain2.com. This solution, however, works only for a single page, not for the entire site. To redirect more than a single page, you can use the rewrite directive with regular expressions to specify entire directories instead of just single files.
redirect matches regular expression patterns in parenthesis. It then references the matched text in the redirect destination using $1 expression, where 1 is the first group of matched text. In more complex examples, subsequent matched groups are given numbers sequentially.
For example, if you wanted to temporarily redirect every page within www.domain1.com to www.domain2.com, you could use the following:
Temporary redirect with rewrite

server {
    . . .
    server_name www.domain1.com;
    rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://www.domain2.com/$1 redirect;
    . . .
}

server {
    . . .
    server_name www.domain2.com;
    . . .
}

By default, the rewrite directive establishes a temporary redirect. If you would like to create a permanent redirect, you can do so by replacing redirect with permanent at the end of the directive, like this:
Permanent redirects

rewrite ^/$ http://www.domain2.com permanent;
rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://www.domain2.com/$1 permanent;

Let’s move on to some specific examples.

Example 1 — Moving to a Different Domain #

If you have established a web presence and would like to change your domain to a new address, it is best not to just abandon your old domain. Bookmarks to your site and links to your site located on other pages throughout the internet will break if your content disappears without any instructions to the browser about how to find its new location. Changing domains without redirecting will cause your site to lose traffic from previous visitors and older links.
In this example, we will configure a redirect from the old domain called domain1.com to the new one called domain2.com. We’ll use permanent redirects here because the old domain will be deprecated, and all traffic should go to the new domain from now on.
Let’s assume you have your website configured to be served from a single domain called domain1.com already configured in Nginx as follows:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/domain1.com

server {
    . . .
    server_name domain1.com;
    . . .
}

We’ll also assume you are already serving your future version of website at domain2.com:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/domain2.com

server {
    . . .
    server_name domain2.com;
    . . .
}

Let’s change the domain1.com server block configuration file to add a permanent redirect to domain2.com:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/domain1.com

server {
    . . .
    server_name domain1.com;
    rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://domain2.com/$1 permanent;
    . . .
}

We’ve added the aforementioned redirect using a rewrite directive. The ^/(.*)$ regular expression matches everything after the / in the URL. For example, http://domain1.com/index.html will get redirected to http://domain2.com/index.html. To achieve the permanent redirect we simply add permanent after the rewrite directive.

Note: Remember to test your configuration using nginx -t and then restart Nginx after you make your changes.

Example 2 — Creating a Persistent Experience Despite Single Page Name Changes #

Sometimes, it is necessary to change the names of individual pages that have already been published and received traffic on your site. Changing the name alone would cause a 404 Not Found error for visitors trying to access the original URL, but you can avoid this by using a redirect. This makes sure that people who have bookmarked your old pages or found them through outdated links on search engines will still reach the correct page.
Let’s assume your website had two separate pages for products and services called products.html and services.html respectively. Now, you’ve decided to replace those two pages with a single offer page called offers.html instead. We will configure a simple redirect for products.html and services.html to offers.html.
We assume you have your website configured as follows:
Original server block configuration

server {
    . . .
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    . . .
}

Configuring the redirects is as simple as using two redirect directives.
Redirects added to the original configuration

server {
    . . .
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    
    rewrite ^/products.html$ /offer.html permanent;
    rewrite ^/services.html$ /offer.html permanent;
    . . .
}

The rewrite directive accepts the original address that has to be redirected as well as the destination address of a new page. Since the change here is not a temporary one, we used permanent in the directive as well. You can use as many redirects like this as you wish to make sure your visitors won’t see unnecessary 404 Not Found errors when moving site contents.

Conclusion #

You now have the knowledge to redirect requests to new locations. Be sure to use the correct redirection type, as an improper use of temporary redirects can hurt your search ranking.
There are multiple other uses of HTTP redirects, including forcing secure SSL connections (i.e. using https instead of http) and making sure all visitors will end up only on the www. prefixed address of the website.
Using redirects correctly will allow you to leverage your current web presence while giving you the ability to modify your site structure as necessary. If you would like to learn more about the ways that you can redirect your visitors, Nginx has great documentation on the subject in rewrite module sections of the official documentation and official blog post on creating redirects.