Setting up redirects from WWW to non-WWW and HTTP to HTTPS in a Digital Ocean Ghost 1-click

In general, my journey to set up a Ghost instance on Digital Ocean wasn't too bad; however, I did end up with a few hiccups. For one, I'm still waiting on my Mailgun set-up to work. For another, I struggled to determine how to establish redirects from WWW to non-WWW and HTTP to HTTPS.

For the latter, I scoured the world wide web looking for some sort of tutorial or blog post that would help me out. I failed to find one but I did find a discussion on the Digital Ocean Discourse that I have since lost the link to.

The discussion outlined that if you already have set up SSL with your non-WWW domain, you can perform the following steps to implement the redirects correctly: run

    ghost config url https://www.javednissar.ca

Replace javednissar.ca with your domain

Then, run

    ghost setup nginx ssl

This will setup nginx and ssl with the www subdomain by getting a new ssl certificate for www.javednissar.ca

Afterwards, you'll need to go into the NGINX configuration files in /var/www/ghost/system/files. In my case, I had to modify javednissar.ca.conf (the configuration for http://javednissar.ca), www.javednissar.ca.conf (the configuration for http://www.javednissar.ca), and www.javednissar.ca-ssl.conf (the configuration for https://www.javednissar.ca). In these files you'll need to comment out the location block that is not for ~/.well-known (that's necessary for renewing the SSL certificate with Let's Encrypt) and then you need to add the following as the last line of the server block:

    return 301 https://javednissar.ca$request_uri

Replace javednissar.ca with your non-WWW URL

The current contents of javednissar.ca.conf, www.javednissar.ca.conf, and www.javednissar.ca-ssl.conf are below.

    server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;

        server_name javednissar.ca;
        root /var/www/ghost/system/nginx-root; # Used for acme.sh SSL verification (https://acme.sh)

        #location / {
        #    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        #    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        #    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        #    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        #    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
        #}

        location ~ /.well-known {
            allow all;
        }

        client_max_body_size 50m;

        return 301 https://javednissar.ca$request_uri;
    }

    server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;

        server_name www.javednissar.ca;
        root /var/www/ghost/system/nginx-root; # Used for acme.sh SSL verification (https://acme.sh)

        #location / {
        #    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        #    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        #    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        #    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        #    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
        #
        #}

        location ~ /.well-known {
            allow all;
        }

        client_max_body_size 50m;

        return 301 https://javednissar.ca$request_uri;
    }

    server {
        listen 443 ssl http2;
        listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

        server_name www.javednissar.ca;
        root /var/www/ghost/system/nginx-root; # Used for acme.sh SSL verification (https://acme.sh)

        ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/www.javednissar.ca/fullchain.cer;
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/www.javednissar.ca/www.javednissar.ca.key;
        include /etc/nginx/snippets/ssl-params.conf;

        #location / {
        #    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        #    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        #    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        #    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        #    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
        #}

        location ~ /.well-known {
            allow all;
        }

        client_max_body_size 50m;
        return 301 https://javednissar.ca$request_uri;
    }

After, the modifications to the NGINX configuration files have been made, you'll need to run the following command to make the non-WWW domain the main domain of the site.

    ghost config url https://javednissar.ca

Replace javednissar.ca with your non-WWW URL