Forcing access to Discourse via domain name only

Product Support Self-hosting

AI-generated summary

Carlo wants to restrict access to their Discourse forum to only be accessible via the domain name (e.g., forum.example.com) and not through the IP address (e.g., 123.123.123.123). They are looking for a way to achieve this using Nginx, similar to how they would use .htaccess with Apache.

Carlo provided an example of the code they would use, but is unsure how to implement it in Discourse. Mittineague clarified the question, and Carlo confirmed that they want to redirect visitors who access the forum via the IP address to the domain name. pfaffman suggested enabling HTTPS and running discourse-setup again to resolve the issue.

1

Hi everyone. So I have setup Discourse and configure Cloudflare and SSL connection.
So far so good. Now I see my website is accessible via the domain name and the default ip, which I do not want.

When I use a CMS such as Wordpress or Modx ( on apache ), I normally configure the ht.access to do the trick. But Discourse is not on Apache…

Is there a way to do that with Nginx ? I am not even sure that Discourse uses it.

Anyway that is the code I would be using:

# Tells the browser to always force SSL.
# Do not use this line if there is a chance you will turn off SSL

add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains";

if ($scheme != "https") {
	rewrite ^ https://discourse.mydomain.com$request_uri permanent;
}
if ($host != "discourse.mydomain.com") {
	rewrite ^ https://discourse.mydomain.com$request_uri permanent;
}

Any suggestions ?

Thanks

2

Still haven’t find a simple way to do it.

If anyone has a solution I’d be grateful :slightly_smiling_face:

3

It sounds like your question is something like:

host:port at 123.123.123.123:8080
domain example.com maps to host:port
you don’t want requests for host:port to work, but only requests for the domain that are mapped to the host:port

But that doesn’t make sense to me and the code example you posted isn’t about that so I am confused.

What instructions did you follow for your install and is this a domain name, host IP, or port problem?

4

Really sorry I didn’t make myself clear.

Let say my website is hosted on the ip: 123.123.123.123
And this is my domain name: forum.example.com

Right now, visitors can browse the forum by accessing the ip 123.123.123.123

What I want is:

When someone goes to the ip, it will be redirect to forum.example.com

The issue is that I am not able to locate ngnix default file.

5

Enable https. Run disourse-setup again and give your email address for the let’s encrypt question.