AWS : ELB : Route 53 : Nginx : naked domain redirect

Question

Setup
I have two rails app instances running in Opsworks Layer. I am using Route 53 and an ELB to route traffic to my Layer.

Objective
To redirect naked domain traffic to my www domain. chicken.com -> www.chicken.com

What I tried
I Alter my nginx conf (on one instance) to solve this problem. I added the following:

server {
 listen 80;
 server_name chicken.com;
 return 301 $scheme://www.chicken.com$request_uri;
}
... rest of config here

Result
Instance is no longer hittable by its IP.

ELB marked the instance I had altered as "Out of Service" since it could no longer be reached by IP (the health check fails).

Question
How can I route naked domains to www domains yet keep my ELB health checks happy?

Answer 1

The ELB health check expects a 200 response. Are you checking against chicken.com instead of www.chicken.com? A redirect page is not sufficient for the health check.

To have both the redirect and provide a 200 response for the ELB check (coming from an internal IP), use the following config:

server {
 listen 80;
 server_name chicken.com;
 return 301 $scheme://www.chicken.com$request_uri;
}
server {
 listen 80 default_server;
 server_name www.chicken.com;
 ...

Note the default_server option. If not set, the first server defined is the default one. See the nginx docs for details.