Need to quickly setup ssl and default to that for our sites.

This article made it simple stupid for getting the certs setup.

Then I wrapped up the redirect as seen below

server {
    listen 80;
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name somesite-dev.stagingarea.info;
    root /home/someuser/somesite-dev.stagingarea.info/public;

    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/nginx.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/nginx.key;
 
    # Prevent a look
    if ($ssl_protocol = "") {
       rewrite ^   https://$server_name$request_uri? permanent;
    }

    index index.html index.htm index.php;

    charset utf-8;
}

Thanks to this post as well http://serverfault.com/a/298803

Still a mystery but

service nginx restart 

was not working had to do

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

to get the server to reload.