Redirect domain to another domain in Meteor - redirect

Question

I have two domain names, one which I've been using for a long time (blainehansenpianostudio.com), and another simplified one I'm now using (blainehansenpiano.com). I'm hosting with Digital Ocean, and my DNS is set up so that both domains point to my droplet, and both show up correctly with my site.
However, I want blainehansenpianostudio.com (the longer, more annoying one) to completely redirect to blainehansenpiano.com, but currently it just acts as an alias, showing the same site but also keeping its annoyingly long url.
The only things I've been able to dig up about http redirection are this meteorpedia article and this stackoverflow question. Neither of these seem to be taking into account the existence of a secondary domain, and are using the in-app routing system. That doesn't seem to be the correct solution, since the redirect should be happening even before the bundle is sent right? I don't want a bunch of extraneous redirects happening within my app.
Also, the SO question has this line:
The easiest way to achieve this is to put the redirect in middleware:
which doesn't mean anything to me. Where is "middleware"?
How do I go about accomplishing this? I feel like I need to change something in the server setup, but I deployed with Meteor Up, which doesn't mention anything about redirects, and am not sure where the server config I need even is.
Thanks in advance!
Update
I tried putting the following code in my lib/router.js file, just to test things out and see if the router is the "middleware" in question:
WebApp.connectHandlers
.use(function(req, res, next) {
console.log(req);
console.log(res);
console.log(next);
next();
});
but it absolutely wasn't. It just broke the router.
Possible (but messy) Solution
Putting this client-side redirect code into main.js:
if (window.location.href.indexOf("blainehansenpianostudio") > -1) {
window.location = "http://blainehansenpiano.com";
}
works, but it seems to lag for a moment after the redirect is made. It seems to me that this is triggering two entirely separate server requests, which is not at all ideal.

Answer 1

For a meteor app, you can use a the javascript to do a conditional redirection. An example below:
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function Redirect() {
if(window.location.href.indexOf("blainehansenpianostudio") > -1){
window.location="http://blainehansenpiano.com";
}
}
//-->
</script>
Are you using any other reverse proxy in front, like Apache, or Ngnix? If so, there can be better ways to achieve this.
If you install Ngnix (which is the cleaner way) for server side redirects, then you may include a new server block for performing the redirect. An example is below:
server {
#implemented by default, change if you need different ip or port
#listen *:80 | *:8000;
server_name blainehansenpianostudio.com;
return 301 $scheme://blainehansenpiano.com$request_uri;
}
In your case, you might choose to hard code the $scheme to http. $request_uri part ensures that the original request URI is included in the redirect response.
To set up nginx, I would also suggest the use of link provided by #Steffo

Answer 2

I use nginx in front of the meteor app (also for SSL termination - I saw that you have a sign-in button on the site, so you maybe want SSL) and it runs also on DO. Use a single nginx instance to accept requests for both domains and reverse-proxy them to a single meteor instance. I wouldn't use redirects inside the meteor app as this could easily interfere with SSL setup
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name www.blainehansenpiano.com;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/blainehansenpiano.crt
(... SSL stuff )
location / {
proxy_pass http://meteor_localhost-OR-remotehost:3000;
(... some web socket setting ...)
}
}
and also the longer name pointing to the same meteor instance
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name www.blainehansenpianostudio.com;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/blainehansenpianostudio.crt
(... SSL stuff )
location / {
proxy_pass http://meteor_localhost-OR-remotehost:3000;
(... some web socket setting ...)
}
}