How do I redirect www to non-www in Route53?

Question

I host my site at domain.com.

My DNS entries in Route53 are as follows:

domain.com      A       xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx      300
domain.com      NS      stuff.awsdns-47.org  172800
domain.com      SOA     stuff.awsdns-47.org  900

I would like to redirect traffic from www.domain.com to domain.com, as currently this just returns a 404. This question on SO suggested a PTR record, and I added that:

www.domain.com  PTR     domain.com           300

but it didn't work. What should I be doing?

Solution 1

PTR is for setting up reverse IP lookups, and it's not something you should care about. Remove it.

What you need is a CNAME for www:

www.domain.com  CNAME  domain.com 300

Solution 2

You can also set a ALIAS for WWW to A record of domain.com:

www.domain.com A ALIAS domain.com 300

so your final DNS entries would be as follows:

domain.com          A       xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx      300
domain.com          NS      stuff.awsdns-47.org  172800
domain.com          SOA     stuff.awsdns-47.org  900
www.domain.com      A       ALIAS domain.com (Hosted Zone ID)

Solution 3

I was able to get this set up by leveraging an additional S3 bucket.

I want my website to be accessible at the non-www example.com. In my case, example.com is set up with a route 53 hosted zone, a s3 bucket, and a cloudfront distribution with a custom ssl cert.

I want www.example.com to redirect to example.com. To do so, I set up a new s3 bucket for www.example.com. I set it to public and set up static website hosting to redirect all requests. The target bucket or domain is example.com. Since I have the ssl cert configured on example.com, I set the protocol to https.

In route 53, within the mydomain.com hosted zone, I created a new A record for www.example.com with an Alias that pointed to the new www s3 bucket website.

Now all requests to www.example.com redirect to https://example.com.

Hope this helps.

Solution 4

After you have a CNAME for both example.com and www.example.com this nginx config will redirect traffic from http to https as well as all www.example.com to example.com

server { 

    listen  80 ;

    server_name  example.com, www.example.com;

    rewrite ^/(.*) https://example.com/$1 permanent;
}

server {  #  redirect www to normal domain

    listen       443  ssl ;

    server_name www.example.com;

    include /etc/nginx/myprojname/include/ssl;

    return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}

server {

    listen  443 ssl ;

    include /etc/nginx/myprojname/include/ssl;

    server_name example.com;

    include /etc/nginx/snippets/nginx_common_location_443;

    location / {

        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000/;
    }

    include /etc/nginx/myprojname/include/custom_server_include;
}

where my actual server is up and listening on port 3000 ... this also terminates my TLS however just remove mention of ssl ... tucked away in those included files are my nginx settings to harden the box

Solution 5

As mentioned above, it's not possible with standard DNS.

Here's the solution I used:

• Setup S3 with static website redirect to your non-www domain
• Create a Cloudfront distibution to your S3 (using the S3 domain, not the one suggested in autocomplete by AWS)
• Add a Route 53 A Record alias to the CloudFront distribution

View more solutions

Comments

[Ck-]

This is not a redirect. In case, you have to define callback URL in some sort of third party service, above solution will not work. For example oAuth(Facebook, Twitter) Authentication.

[Utpal - Ur Best Pal]

I have done this however still it is not working. Anything else that may be required to be done?

[trees_are_great]

After adding the alias, I needed to delete the browser cache to get this to work.

[Hardeep Singh]

And it depends on the previous TTL of your DNS.

[Madeo]

nope, not working

[Tuxedo Joe]

This was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

[myroslav]

This solution is ok for HTTP but is not working for HTTPS requests. You need to involve CloudFront to serve HTTPS. See serverfault.com/a/942537/7005

[Mathias Conradt]

CNAME would mean you have duplicate content on www and Apex, which isn't optimal for Google/SEO and gets a penalized (in SEO terms, for duplicate content).

[Admin]

with "not the autocomplete" what is meant is that you need to copy the static website url and paste it into the origin dialogue of cloudfront. E.g. www.example.com.s3-website.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com

[Admin]

indeed with this method you can only redirect TO https but not FROM https, you need to do the extra step via cloudfront as in the comment linked above