There appear to be many questions and guides out there that instruct how to setup nginx to redirect http requests to https. Many are outdated, or just flat out wrong.

server {
  listen *:80;
  server_name <%= @fqdn %>;
  #root /nowhere; 
  #rewrite ^ https://$server_name$request_uri? permanent; 
  #rewrite ^ https://$server_name$request_uri permanent;
  #return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
  #return 301 http://$server_name$request_uri;
  #return 301 http://192.168.33.10$request_uri;
  return 301 http://$host$request_uri;

}
server {
  listen *:443 ssl default_server;
  server_name <%= @fqdn %>;
  server_tokens off;
  root <%= @git_home %>/gitlab/public;

  ssl                           on;
  ssl_certificate               <%= @gitlab_ssl_cert %>;
  ssl_certificate_key           <%= @gitlab_ssl_key %>;
  ssl_protocols                 SSLv3 TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
  ssl_ciphers                   AES:HIGH:!ADH:!MDF;
  ssl_prefer_server_ciphers     on;

  location / {
    # serve static files from defined root folder;.
    # @gitlab is a named location for the upstream fallback, see below
    try_files $uri $uri/index.html $uri.html @gitlab;
  }

  # if a file, which is not found in the root folder is requested,
  # then the proxy pass the request to the upsteam (gitlab puma)
  location @gitlab {
    proxy_read_timeout 300; # https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/694
    proxy_connect_timeout 300; # https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/694
    proxy_redirect     off;
ect....

I've restarted after every configuration change, and yet I still only get the 'Welcome to nginx' page when visiting http://192.168.33.10. whereas https://192.168.33.10 works perfectly.

Why will nginx still not redirect http requests to https?

tailf /var/log/nginx/access.log
192.168.33.1 - - [22/Oct/2013:03:41:39 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0"
192.168.33.1 - - [22/Oct/2013:03:44:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 133 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0"

tailf /var/log/nginx/gitlab_error.lob
2013/10/22 02:29:14 [crit] 27226#0: *1 connect() to unix:/home/git/gitlab/tmp/sockets/gitlab.socket failed (2: No such file or directory) while connecting to upstream, client: 192.168.33.1, server: gitlab.localdomain, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "http://unix:/home/git/gitlab/tmp/sockets/gitlab.socket:/", host: "192.168.33.10"

Resources
http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls
How to make nginx redirect
How to force or redirect to SSL in nginx?
nginx ssl redirect
Nginx & Https Redirection
https://www.tinywp.in/301-redirect-wordpress/
How to force or redirect to SSL in nginx?