HTTPS works perfectly, but HTTP URL displays NGINX welcome page and doesn't redirect

I’ve recently installed Discourse to a Ubuntu Focal Fossa VPS and it works great, however I’m struggling to overcome some URL peculiarities.

The following is the behaviour I am seeing (in Safari). I have A NAME records for @, WWW and * created in with my registrar.

example.com [displays Welcome to nginx! page] FAIL
www.example.com [redirects to https://example.com] PASS
http://example.com [displays Welcome to nginx! page] FAIL
http://www.example.com [redirects to https://example.com and works fine] PASS
https://example.com [works as expected, doesn't redirect] PASS
https://www.example.com [errors with 'This Connection is Not Private' browser message] FAIL

I would like my installation to be at the root/apex so I entered example.com at setup.

Any advice graciously received!

Are you running an external nginx in the Discourse server? Why?

Discourse already ships with a pre-configured nginx that will handle that provided you let it listen to the 80 and 443 ports.

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Hi @Falco, thank you for your reply. Not to my knowledge no, the image from the VPS provider is just called “Focal Fossa Clean OS” which I assume means it contains no third party tools.

This is just straight out of the box using the “30 minute” install route published.

sudo su

wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh

git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker.git /var/discourse

cd /var/discourse

./discourse-setup
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Ohh that is a really weird behavior then!

Can you share your app.yml here (remove the sensitive data like passwords). The file lives at /var/discourse/containers/app.yml.

Also the docker ps -a output.

Sure thing, thank you. Would my domain having a weird TLD cause any issues? (it’s a .community).

## this is the all-in-one, standalone Discourse Docker container template
##
## After making changes to this file, you MUST rebuild
## /var/discourse/launcher rebuild app
##
## BE *VERY* CAREFUL WHEN EDITING!
## YAML FILES ARE SUPER SUPER SENSITIVE TO MISTAKES IN WHITESPACE OR ALIGNMENT!
## visit http://www.yamllint.com/ to validate this file as needed

templates:
  - "templates/postgres.template.yml"
  - "templates/redis.template.yml"
  - "templates/web.template.yml"
  - "templates/web.ratelimited.template.yml"
## Uncomment these two lines if you wish to add Lets Encrypt (https)
  - "templates/web.ssl.template.yml"
  - "templates/web.letsencrypt.ssl.template.yml"

## which TCP/IP ports should this container expose?
## If you want Discourse to share a port with another webserver like Apache or nginx,
## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/17247 for details
expose:
  - "80:80"   # http
  - "443:443" # https

params:
  db_default_text_search_config: "pg_catalog.english"

  ## Set db_shared_buffers to a max of 25% of the total memory.
  ## will be set automatically by bootstrap based on detected RAM, or you can override
  db_shared_buffers: "768MB"

  ## can improve sorting performance, but adds memory usage per-connection
  #db_work_mem: "40MB"

  ## Which Git revision should this container use? (default: tests-passed)
  #version: tests-passed

env:
  LANG: en_US.UTF-8
  # DISCOURSE_DEFAULT_LOCALE: en

  ## How many concurrent web requests are supported? Depends on memory and CPU cores.
  ## will be set automatically by bootstrap based on detected CPUs, or you can override
  UNICORN_WORKERS: 8

  ## TODO: The domain name this Discourse instance will respond to
  ## Required. Discourse will not work with a bare IP number.
  DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME: example.com

  ## Uncomment if you want the container to be started with the same
  ## hostname (-h option) as specified above (default "$hostname-$config")
  #DOCKER_USE_HOSTNAME: true

  ## TODO: List of comma delimited emails that will be made admin and developer
  ## on initial signup example 'user1@example.com,user2@example.com'
  DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS: ‘email@gmail.com'

  ## TODO: The SMTP mail server used to validate new accounts and send notifications
  # SMTP ADDRESS, username, and password are required
  # WARNING the char '#' in SMTP password can cause problems!
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_ADDRESS: smtp.postmarkapp.com
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_PORT: 587
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_USER_NAME: username
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_PASSWORD: “password”
  #DISCOURSE_SMTP_ENABLE_START_TLS: true           # (optional, default true)
  #DISCOURSE_SMTP_DOMAIN: discourse.example.com    # (required by some providers)

  ## If you added the Lets Encrypt template, uncomment below to get a free SSL certificate
  LETSENCRYPT_ACCOUNT_EMAIL: email@gmail.com


  ## The http or https CDN address for this Discourse instance (configured to pull)
  ## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/14857 for details
  #DISCOURSE_CDN_URL: https://discourse-cdn.example.com

  ## The maxmind geolocation IP address key for IP address lookup
  ## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/-/137387/23 for details
  #DISCOURSE_MAXMIND_LICENSE_KEY: 1234567890123456

## The Docker container is stateless; all data is stored in /shared
volumes:
  - volume:
      host: /var/discourse/shared/standalone
      guest: /shared
  - volume:
      host: /var/discourse/shared/standalone/log/var-log
      guest: /var/log

## Plugins go here
## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/19157 for details
hooks:
  after_code:
    - exec:
        cd: $home/plugins
        cmd:
          - git clone https://github.com/discourse/docker_manager.git

## Any custom commands to run after building
run:
  - exec: echo "Beginning of custom commands"
  ## If you want to set the 'From' email address for your first registration, uncomment and change:
  ## After getting the first signup email, re-comment the line. It only needs to run once.
  #- exec: rails r "SiteSetting.notification_email='info@unconfigured.discourse.org'"
  - exec: echo "End of custom commands"

and

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                 COMMAND        CREATED          STATUS          PORTS                                      NAMES
465fbf1c3fb8   local_discourse/app   "/sbin/boot"   47 minutes ago   Up 46 minutes   0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp, 0.0.0.0:443->443/tcp   app

Maybe this distro your provider give you comes with pre-installed nginx ?

What does curl -I localhost prints?

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server : nginx/1.18.0
Date : Mon, 25 Jan 2021 20:18:00 GMT
Content-Type : text/html
Content-Length : 169
Connection : keep-alive
Location : https://example.com

Does this mean it was already installed? (sorry I’m a n00b at this)

That is the exact expect response when it’s working. So, is http://example.com still showing nginx welcome page?

https://example.com is working just fine, but http://example.com (HTTP) goes off to the Welcome to nginx! page :sob:

Can you share the actual domain?

Sooo, that doesn’t give me the nginx welcome page at all.

Can you try it on another device like your phone?

curl -I example.com -L
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.18.0
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2021 20:35:21 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 169
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://example.com/

HTTP/2 200 
server: nginx
date: Mon, 25 Jan 2021 20:35:22 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
vary: Accept-Encoding
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
x-content-type-options: nosniff
x-download-options: noopen
x-permitted-cross-domain-policies: none
referrer-policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
x-discourse-route: finish_installation/index
cache-control: no-cache, no-store
content-security-policy: base-uri 'none'; object-src 'none'; script-src https://example.com/logs/ https://example.com/sidekiq/ https://example.com/mini-profiler-resources/ https://example.com/assets/ https://example.com/brotli_asset/ https://example.com/extra-locales/ https://example.com/highlight-js/ https://example.com/javascripts/ https://example.com/plugins/ https://example.com/theme-javascripts/ https://example.com/svg-sprite/; worker-src 'self' https://example.com/assets/ https://example.com/brotli_asset/ https://example.com/javascripts/ https://example.com/plugins/
x-request-id: 8755d4fa-387f-4509-8709-b6075f274d09
x-runtime: 0.026020
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000
1 Like

Ok well I’m clearly a moron. Tried on my phone over 4G (to check local DNS), all those URLs worked fine. Reconnected to WiFi, all work fine. So I then cleared the cache of Safari on the desktop and boom — everything works there too.

It must have been from when I was initially testing the host and the cache hasn’t flushed since. Thank you so much for your help to troubleshoot and sorry for taking up your time.

2 Likes

fwiw I just ran into this same issue today with Ubuntu 22.04. Clearing Safari cache and refreshing also fixed the issue.