Ngnix: Solution for Directory Resolution Problem in Virtual Hosting

Nginx displays a peculiar but logical behavior when handling directories specified without the ending slash. For example you have a directory like https://www.example2.com/dir/. However you specify the url as https://www.example2.com/dir. Also assume that you have configured the server for virtual hosting and the alternative server names are: www.example.com, www.example2.com etc. and they are specified in the same order. Now when you try to fetch https://www.example2.com/dir you will instead be redirected to https://www.example.com/dir. Here is why nginx does it along with a simple solution to the rather baffling problem (ok complex problem - I said it).

Any decent web server, nginx and apache included, will redirect url like https://www.example2.com/dir to the proper url - https://www.example2.com/dir.

However nginx when internally redirecting (using 301) for a rewrite directive if the redirect is relative (has no host part), then when redirecting Nginx uses the “Host” header if the header match name of server_name directive or the first name of server_name directive, if the header does not match or is absent. If no server_name is set, then the local hostname is used.

If you want Nginx to always use the “Host” header as you would for virtual hosting, you can use _ as server_name as of 0.6.x. However there is a better way which I recommend. Use the following directives to use host header instead of server_name:
optimize_server_names off;
server_name_in_redirect off;

Additionally optimize_server_names has the benefit of improving the nginx server performance.