Correct way in new versions of nginx

Turn out my first answer to this question was correct at certain time, but it turned into another pitfall - to stay up to date please check Taxing rewrite pitfalls

I have been corrected by many SE users, so the credit goes to them, but more importantly, here is the correct code:

server {
       listen         80;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       return         301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
       listen         443 ssl;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       # add Strict-Transport-Security to prevent man in the middle attacks
       add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" always; 

       [....]
}

upstream appservers {
    zone appservers 64k;

    server appserv1.example.com      weight=5;
    server appserv2.example.com:8080 fail_timeout=5s slow_start=30s;
    server 192.0.2.1                 max_fails=3;

    server reserve1.example.com:8080 backup;
    server reserve2.example.com:8080 backup;
}

There you go! From docs

HTH