How to redirect to a different domain using NGINX?

Question

server_name supports suffix matches using .mydomain.com syntax:

server {
  server_name .mydomain.com;
  rewrite ^ http://www.adifferentdomain.com$request_uri? permanent;
}

or on any version 0.9.1 or higher:

server {
  server_name .mydomain.com;
  return 301 http://www.adifferentdomain.com$request_uri;
}

server {
    server_name .mydomain.com;
    return 301 http://www.adifferentdomain.com$request_uri;
}

http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpRewriteModule#return

and

http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls#Taxing_Rewrites

Why use the rewrite module if you can do return? Technically speaking, return is part of the rewrite module as you can read here but this snippet is easier to read imho.

server {
    server_name  .domain.com;

    return 302 $scheme://forwarded-domain.com;
}

You can also give it a 301 redirect.

That should work via HTTPRewriteModule.

Example rewrite from www.example.com to example.com:

server {    
    server_name www.example.com;    
    rewrite ^ http://example.com$request_uri? permanent; 
}

If you would like to redirect requests for "domain1.com" to "domain2.com", you could create a server block that looks like this:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name domain1.com;
    return 301 $scheme://domain2.com$request_uri;
}

I'm using this code for my sites

server {
        listen 80;
        listen 443;
        server_name  .domain.com;

        return 301 $scheme://newdomain.com$request_uri;
}