Nginx – Fix HSTS Max-Age Not Effective or Updating

Have you tried Cache-Control flags in your nginx configuration ?

Sample configuration:

upstream yourappserver{
  server 0.0.0.0:6677;
}


proxy_cache_path  /tmp/cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=my-test-cache:8m max_size=5000m inactive=300m;

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name your.domain.tld;
    root /path/to/the/document/root/;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;

    location / {
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
      proxy_cache my-test-cache;
      proxy_cache_valid  200 404  1m;
      proxy_cache_valid 302 20m;

      proxy_cache_use_stale   error timeout invalid_header updating;
      proxy_redirect off;

      if (-f $request_filename/index.html) {
        rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break;
      }
      if (-f $request_filename.html) {
        rewrite (.*) $1.html break;
      }
      if (!-f $request_filename) {
        proxy_pass http://yourappserver;
        break;
      }
    }

    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
      root html;
    }
}

I think you are looking for this particular configuration snippet

proxy_cache_valid 302 20m;

This doesn't work because the if is evaluated before the request is passed to the backend, so the $upstream_http_ variables don't have any values yet. add_header with an empty value is ignored, so you can use a map to conditionally add the header like so:

map $upstream_http_strict_transport_security $sts {
  '' max-age=15552000;
}

server {
  location / {
    add_header Strict-Transport-Security $sts;
  }
}