Prevent port change on redirect in nginx

Solution 1:

I my case nginx listens to port 80 inside a docker container but it's mapped to port 8080 (or any random port) outside the container. There is no reverse proxy in-between that can add proper headers for port and also don't want to hardcode it in the nginx configuration.

Example of wrong redirect:

http://localhost:8080/directory -> http://localhost/directory/

I tried:

server {
  # ...
  port_in_redirect off;
  server_name_in_redirect off;
  # ...
}

But didn't work. The only thing that worked well was:

server {
  # ...
  absolute_redirect off;
  # ...
}

Manual entry forabsolute_redirect says:

If disabled, redirects issued by nginx will be relative.

I find this to be more flexible and doesn't require you to have the server name and port hardcoded anywhere.

If you are worried about redirects with relative URLs check this comment.

Solution 2:

I found the answer to this question by more carefully reading the HttpCoreModule docs.

port_in_redirect off;

This retains the port used by the client during redirects. Closely related is server_name_in_redirect which uses the first hostname for redirects. As I didn't want sitename.v.myserver.com to redirect to sitename.com,