Hi there, I would like to make sure the www subdomain redirects the users to the actual Discourse install. I feel like this needs to be the case to ensure I don’t lose visitors. Most people don’t leave out the ‘www’ when visiting websites.

That’s why you want to use a redirect, discourse can’t be served from multiple URLs. Pick one, redirect the other.

I have a similar issue and using a URL redirect record at the DNS level doesn’t solve the problem for me. I installed Discourse using the hostname ‘www.example.com’ and the following DNS records: A Record host:WWW value:my_server_ip CNAME host:@ value: www.example.com URL Redirect Record host:@ value:https://www.example.com If I then use SSL Server Test (Powered by Qualys SSL Labs) to check the URL https://example.com without the WWW I get a Certificate name mismatch and in my browser a NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID error. Apologies again if I’m missing something obvious here, networking isn’t my strong point!

Hence why I posted those links. I’d love it to be as simple as a DNS change. It didn’t seem to be that simple to me either. To work via https I had to ensure that a cert was being registered for both addresses. To achieve that use one of the guides I posted above. The other guide allows you to perform a redirect.

Users are very unlikely to specify the protocol when typing in a URL. If you’re really worried about it you can just use Cloudflare for DNS and a simple page rule.

Yeah, I ‘moved’ my domain (well I just chose to cut off the www) which is why I had to serve existing links already on sites I didn’t control referring to my old domain with https. That might explain why in my case I had no choice but to do the full job. So what I think you are saying is, if you are just happy to have someone type in www.example.com and for it to be redirected to https://example.com requires only a DNS change? However, if for any reason you want https://www.example.com to work (in my case I did because such links were already ‘out there’) you have to follow the provided guides

Or just use a page rule as stated above. It will front the domain using a wildcard cert and redirect the traffic seamlessly. All with zero additional complexity on the Discourse server.

[image] Stephen: Or just use a page rule What’s a page rule? I’m intending to follow How To Install Discourse Behind Nginx on Ubuntu 14.04 | DigitalOcean to install Nginx on my Digital Ocean droplet and then apply the rules listed in “step 2” to redirect to the correct domain. I think this should work! I’ll try it tomorrow and see if it allows me to redirect all combinations of https://www., http://www, http://domain.com, https://domain.com to my discourse hostname which the Lets Encrypt cert which is is https://www.domain.com. We’ll see!

Did you need to install Nginx in-front of Discourse to get this to work? On my Digital Ocean droplet the path “/etc/nginx/” used in the additional hooks doesn’t exist.

Nope, no additional install. Also, the only block I needed to add is: after_ssl: - replace: filename: "/etc/runit/1.d/letsencrypt" from: /--keylength/ to: "-d mywebsite.org --keylength" (http to https redirect seems to be working fine without the two other replace blocks, those with nginx)

Making 'www' work with Discourse

Product Support

syl May 14, 2020, 3:22pm 19

@Erik_Manger, DNS-based solutions didn’t work for me with SSL. I used the first link provided by @merefield and it works well.

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Making 'www' work with Discourse

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