Dealing with nginx 400 "The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port" error

I ran into a similar problem. It works on one server and does not on another server with same Nginx configuration. Found the the solution which is answered by Igor here http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,1612,1627#msg-1627

Yes. Or you may combine SSL/non-SSL servers in one server:

server {
  listen 80;
  listen 443 default ssl;

  # ssl on   - remember to comment this out

}

The error says it all actually. Your configuration tells Nginx to listen on port 80 (HTTP) and use SSL. When you point your browser to http://localhost, it tries to connect via HTTP. Since Nginx expects SSL, it complains with the error.

The workaround is very simple. You need two server sections:

server {
  listen 80;

  // other directives...
}

server {
  listen 443;

  ssl on;
  // SSL directives...

  // other directives...
}

The above answers are incorrect in that most over-ride the 'is this connection HTTPS' test to allow serving the pages over http irrespective of connection security.

The secure answer using an error-page on an NGINX specific http 4xx error code to redirect the client to retry the same request to https. (as outlined here https://serverfault.com/questions/338700/redirect-http-mydomain-com12345-to-https-mydomain-com12345-in-nginx )

The OP should use:

server {
  listen        12345;
  server_name   php.myadmin.com;

  root         /var/www/php;

  ssl           on;

  # If they come here using HTTP, bounce them to the correct scheme
  error_page 497 https://$server_name:$server_port$request_uri;

  [....]
}