How do I force redirect all 404's (or every page, whether invalid or not) to the homepage?

Question

Currently every invalid page is 500 (Internal Server Error) because I probably messed up with my server block configuration.

I decided to shut down my website a while ago and created a simple one-page, thank-you homepage. However old links and external sites are still trying to access other parts of the site, which no longer exists.

How do I force redirect all non-homepage (any invalid URL) to the homepage?

I tried with the following block, but it didn't work:

location / {     try_files $uri $uri/ $document_uri/index.html; } 

My current configuration is (I don't even serve PHP files right now, ie homepage is simple html):

server {     server_name www.example.com example.com;     access_log /srv/www/example.com/logs/access.log;     error_log /srv/www/example.com/logs/error.log;     root /srv/www/example.com/public_html;     index index.php index.html;      location / {         try_files $uri $uri/ $document_uri/index.html;     }      # Disable favicon.ico logging     location = /favicon.ico {         log_not_found off;         access_log off;     }      # Allow robots and disable logging     location = /robots.txt {         allow all;         log_not_found off;         access_log off;     }      # Enable permalink structures     if (!-e $request_filename) {         rewrite . /index.php last;     }      # Handle php requests     location ~ \.php$ {         try_files $uri = 404;         include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;         fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;         fastcgi_index index.php;         fastcgi_send_timeout 900;         fastcgi_read_timeout 900;         fastcgi_connect_timeout 900;         fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;     }      # Disable static content logging and set cache time to max     location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|css|js|ico|xml)$ {         access_log off;         log_not_found off;         expires max;     }      # Deny access to htaccess and htpasswd files     location ~ /\.ht {         deny  all;     }      # Deny access to hidden files (beginning with a period)     location ~ /\. {         access_log off; log_not_found off; deny all;     } } 

Answer 1

Setting the error page to the home page like this

error_page 404 /index.html; 

has a small problem, the status code of the home page will be "404 not found", if you want to load the home page with a "200 ok" status code you should do it like this

error_page 404 =200 /index.html; 

This will convert the "404 not found" error code to a "200 ok" code, and load the home page

The second method which @jvperrin mentioned is good too,

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; 

but you need to keep 1 thing in mind, since it's the location / any asset that doesn't match another location and is not found will also load the index.html, for example missing images, css, js files, but in your case I can see you already have another location that's matching the assets' extensions, so you shouldn't face this problem.

Answer 2

To get a true redirect you could do this:

in server block define the error-page you want to redirect like this:

# define error page error_page 404 = @myownredirect; error_page 500 = @myownredirect; 

Then you define that location:

# error page location redirect 302 location @myownredirect {   return 302 /; } 

In this case errors 404 and 500 generates HTTP 302 (temporary redirect) to / (could of course be any URL)

If you use fast-cgi for php or other these blocks must have the following added to send the errors "upstrem" to server-block:

fastcgi_intercept_errors on;