Redirect Elastic Beanstalk URL to domain name

Question

I have an app hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which is assigned an environment URL as such:

<my-appname>.<aws-region>.elasticbeanstalk.com

I also have registered a domain name as such:

my-appname.com

In AWS Route 53, I have an A ALIAS pointing my-appname.com to the EB environment as such:

my-appname.com > A ALIAS <my-appname>.<aws-region>.elasticbeanstalk.com

From my registrar, I have Route 53 nameservers set up to manage DNS via Amazon.

Everything Works Fine

What I'd like to understand how to do is ensure any requests to the <my-appname>.<aws-region>.elasticbeanstalk.com> domain get 301'd to the my-appname.com domain.

I'm using an Apache RewriteRule currently to redirect all non-www requests to the www version of the website using this in a .config file:

<If "'%{HTTP_HOST}' !~ /^www\./">
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
</If>

Would it be good practice to simply change the HTTP_HOST to my-appname.com?

EDIT: That approach doesn't seem to work anyway. Not sure why?

Answer 1

My current understanding is the best approach for this is to use server-level re-writes to address the issue. An example (for an Apache server) is as follows:

Rewrite Engine On

# Catch requests to domains other than your primary (custom) domain
Rewrite Cond %{HTTP_HOST} !~ appname.tld

# Send those requests to the primary domain
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.appname.tld%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301, L]

Answer 2

When using Elastic Beanstalk (Amazon Linux 2) and Nginx you have two solutions:

Extend Elastic Beanstalk default nginx.conf

Create a file named .platform/nginx/conf.d/redirections.conf inside your source code that contains:

server {
    server_name .elasticbeanstalk.com;
    return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}

Nginx documentation: https://www.nginx.com/blog/creating-nginx-rewrite-rules/

(example.com being your own domain)

Create your own nginx.conf that replaces the default one from Elastic Beanstalk

• Copy the content from the original /etc/nginx/nginx.conf by connecting to your Elastic Beanstalk EC2 instance using SSH (*)
• Create a file named .platform/nginx/nginx.conf inside your source code and paste the content
• Modify it to your needs and add:

server {
    server_name .elasticbeanstalk.com;
    return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}

You should end up with a /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (taken from Amazon Linux 2 as of 2022/05/08) that looks like this:

# Elastic Beanstalk Nginx Configuration File

user                    nginx;
error_log               /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid                     /var/run/nginx.pid;
worker_processes        auto;
worker_rlimit_nofile    32136;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    include       conf.d/*.conf;

    map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
        default     "upgrade";
    }

    server {
        listen        80 default_server;
        access_log    /var/log/nginx/access.log main;

        client_header_timeout 60;
        client_body_timeout   60;
        keepalive_timeout     60;
        gzip                  off;
        gzip_comp_level       4;
        gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

        # Include the Elastic Beanstalk generated locations
        include conf.d/elasticbeanstalk/*.conf;
    }

    # ADDED
    server {
        server_name .elasticbeanstalk.com;
        return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
    }
}

More on Nginx configuration

While at it, I also recommend other modifications to your Nginx configuration.

Redirect www to root

Example with redirecting www.example.com to example.com.

# .platform/nginx/conf.d/redirections.conf

# https://stackoverflow.com/a/43089681
# https://tribulant.com/docs/hosting-domains/hosting/9867/redirecting-to-www-or-non-www/
# This can be done at the load balancer level but I prefer to do it here
# Test this with `curl --head https://www.example.com` and `curl --head http://www.example.com`
server {
    server_name www.example.com;
    return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}

Prerequisites:

• AWS Certificate Manager (ACM): create one certificate for both example.com and www.example.com
• Route 53 : create A records for example.com and www.example.com that route to the load balancer

HTTP security headers

I recommend to set these HTTP headers for security:

# .platform/nginx/conf.d/security_headers.conf

# Remove Nginx version in error page and header
server_tokens off;

# Security headers thanks to https://observatory.mozilla.org/ and https://webpagetest.org/
# Inspired by https://www.mozilla.org/ HTTP headers
# https://gist.github.com/plentz/6737338
# https://github.com/GetPageSpeed/ngx_security_headers
add_header Content-Security-Policy "default-src 'self';
add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload";
add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
add_header X-Frame-Options DENY;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";

File compression (.js, .css, .html...)

You can enable compression with gzip on;. Unfortunately you cannot extend the default nginx.conf to enable compression. You will have to copy-paste and modify the original nginx.conf (.platform/nginx/nginx.conf).

Note: you can have your own .platform/nginx/nginx.conf and still use files inside .platform/nginx/conf.d/ directory.

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

2 solutions: use the load balancer (Application Load Balancer) or a custom .platform/nginx/nginx.conf.

# .platform/nginx/nginx.conf

...

    server {
        listen        80 default_server;

        ...

        # ADDED
        # [AWS documentation - Configuring HTTP to HTTPS redirection](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/configuring-https-httpredirect.html)
        # https://github.com/awsdocs/elastic-beanstalk-samples/blob/9720e38e9da155752dce132a31d8e13a27364b83/configuration-files/aws-provided/security-configuration/https-redirect/nodejs/https-redirect-nodejs.config#L61
        # https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-Forwarded-Proto
        if ($http_x_forwarded_proto = "http") {
            return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
        }

        ...
    }

...

(*) Open port 22 in your EC2 instance security group (something like *AWSEBSecurityGroup*) then go to:

EC2 > Instances > Connect > EC2 Instance Connect (browser-based SSH connection)