Tested in Ubuntu 14 / Nginx 1.11
If you use a custom port to serve SSL and you want to force a secure connection redirecting from http to https, a solution is use error_page directive with code 497:
server {
listen 8080 ssl;
root /usr/share/nginx/mydomain;
index index.html index.php;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/mydomain.com.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/mydomain.com.key;
error_page 497 https://$host:$server_port$request_uri;
...
}
Don’t forget to reload nginx:
~ $ /etc/init.d/nginx reload