How to get nginx to redirect from www to non-www domain?

Let's say I want to redirect from www.example.com to example.com and I want to do this using nginx. I looked around and did not see any good documentation on this so I figured I would ask and answer my own question.

I also looked at this on the Nginx wiki and other blogs and the best way performance wise is to do the following:

To redirect from www.example.com to example.com using nginx (version 1.0.12 at time of writing).

server {
  server_name www.example.com;
  rewrite ^ $scheme://example.com$request_uri permanent; 
  # permanent sends a 301 redirect whereas redirect sends a 302 temporary redirect
  # $scheme uses http or https accordingly
}

server {
  server_name example.com;
  # the rest of your config goes here
}

When requests come to example.com, no if statements are used for performance. And it uses $request_uri rather than having to create a $1 match which taxes the rewrite (see Nginx Common Pitfalls page).

Sources:

https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/tutorials/config_pitfalls/#server-name-if
http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpCoreModule#.24scheme

After some digging around and some missteps, here is the solution. The gotcha I ran into is to make sure to use "http://example.com$uri". Inserting a / in front of $uri results in a redirect to http://example.com//

  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.example.com;
    rewrite ^ http://example.com$uri permanent;
  }

  # the server directive is nginx's virtual host directive.
  server {
    # port to listen on. Can also be set to an IP:PORT
    listen 80;

    # Set the charset
    charset utf-8;

    # Set the max size for file uploads to 10Mb
    client_max_body_size 10M;

    # sets the domain[s] that this vhost server requests for
    server_name example.com;

    # doc root
    root /var/www/example.com;

    # vhost specific access log
    access_log  /var/log/nginx_access.log  main;


    # set vary to off to avoid duplicate headers
    gzip off;
    gzip_vary off;


    # Set image format types to expire in a very long time
    location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico)$ {
        access_log off;
        expires max;
    }

    # Set css and js to expire in a very long time
    location ~* ^.+\.(css|js)$ {
        access_log off;
        expires max;
    }

    # Catchall for everything else
    location / {
      root /var/www/example.com;
      access_log off;

      index index.html;
      expires 1d;

      if (-f $request_filename) {
        break;
      }
    }
  }

Please visit this question in SO: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11733363/846634

From the better answer:

Actually you don't even need a rewrite.

server {
    #listen 80 is default
    server_name www.example.com;
    return 301 $scheme://example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
    #listen 80 is default
    server_name example.com;
    ## here goes the rest of your conf...
}

As my answer is getting more and more up votes but the above as well. You should never use a rewrite in this context. Why? Because nginx has to process and start a search. If you use return (which should be available in any nginx version) it directly stops execution. This is preferred in any context.

How to get nginx to redirect from www to non-www domain?

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