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; 

       [....]
}

You need to proxy it with the [P] option. This also will require you to set up mod_proxy.

See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html and search for "force proxy".

Keep in mind that this will put additional load on your Apache. How much load is dependent upon how much traffic you receive and how quickly the Tomcat server can return traffic back to the Apache.

You could also just simply include /bar in your mod_proxy_ajp rules or mod_jk configuration (JkMount), which would be a far far better solution than using mod_rewrite.