nginx /index.html to / rewrite

Question

I am trying to rewrite /index.html to / for SEO purposes (stupid search engines which confuse index.html with / and penalize for duplicate content) -- also to reconcile web analytics data.

I've tried every solution I've found on stackoverflow, nginx documentation, etc and have had no success. I'm thinking I must have some other configuration issue or something else painfully obvious. This is my first nginx installation -- used to Apache and IIS!!

Here is my default.conf:

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  web.local;
    #charset koi8-r;
    #access_log  /var/log/nginx/log/host.access.log  main;

    #error_page  404              /404.html;

    # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
    #
    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root   /var/www/html;
    }

    # proxy the PHP scripts to Apache listening on 127.0.0.1:80
    #
    #location ~ \.php$ {
    #    proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1;
    #}

Here is my virtual.conf (commented out section was my most recent attempt -- when uncommented it gives a 301 Moved Permanently error when you attempt to access www.domain.com/index.html):

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

    location / {
        root   /var/www/html/domain.com;
        index  index.html;
        #if ($request_uri = /index.html) {
        #    rewrite ^ http://www.domain.com permanent;
        #}
    }
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name domain.com;
    rewrite ^/(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 permanent;
    }

HTTP Response Headers for cobaco's solution:

URL:
http://www.domain.com
http/1.1 301 moved permanently
server: nginx/1.2.8
date: Thu, 16 May 2013 01:42:58 GMT
content-type: text/html
content-length: 184
connection: keep-alive
location: http://domain.com/

Redirecting URL:
http://domain.com/
http/1.1 301 moved permanently
server: nginx/1.2.8
date: Thu, 16 May 2013 01:42:58 GMT
content-type: text/html
content-length: 184
connection: keep-alive
location: http://www.domain.com/

I figured that this line might be causing problems: "location = /index.html {return 301 $scheme://domain.com/;}" so I added www. after "scheme://" -- let me know if this is a bad thing to do! This resulted in the following HTTP Response Headers:

URL:
http://www.domain.com
http/1.1 301 moved permanently
server: nginx/1.2.8
date: Thu, 16 May 2013 01:42:58 GMT
content-type: text/html
content-length: 184
connection: keep-alive
location: http://www.domain.com/

Redirecting URL:
http://www.domain.com/
http/1.1 301 moved permanently
server: nginx/1.2.8
date: Thu, 16 May 2013 01:42:58 GMT
content-type: text/html
content-length: 184
connection: keep-alive
location: http://www.domain.com/

After some more tinkering, the following configuration does what I want it to do but is not ideal due to the if statement. Any suggestions?

server {
  server_name  www.domain.com;
  root /var/www/html/domain.com;
  index index.html;
  if ($request_uri = /index.html) {
      return 301 http://www.domain.com/;
  }
  #location = /index.html {
  #    return 301 $scheme://www.domain.com/;
  #}
}

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

Answer 1

You final solution is totally fine.

if directive is evil ONLY IF it is inside a location block. Also you only have a return directive inside the if block. I don't see anything wrong with that. reference: http://wiki.nginx.org/IfIsEvil

The infinite redirect loop in cobaco's solution is because

  index  index.html;

triggers another round of location match. So nginx will be trapped into the location = /index.html again after it's redirected to http://www.domain.com/.