Multiple 404 error pages in nginx

Question

I am running nginx server. I want to serve a custom error page for a particular request only. For-example for request

http://localhost/abc1 & http://localhost/abc2

if these pages are not there I want to serve a custom error page. This custom error page should appear only for above two mentioned links, rest of the page errors can show the default error page. I have tried different configuration but nothing seems to work. Thoughts

Regards, Farrukh Arshad.

Answer 1

Your answer is quite correct, but as you said, you only defined them for the html's, remove the extension and it should work for the whole directory, no need to repeat the root, just define it in the server block scope

server {
    listen 80;
    root   /var/www/nginx-default;

    location /abc1 {        
        error_page 404 /special_error.html;
    }

    location /abc2 {
        error_page 404 /special_error2.html;
    }
}

Answer 2

Ok, I found the answer. The trick is you have to define error_page explicitly for all those special locations. Here is the configuration which worked for me.

location / {
    root   /var/www/nginx-default;
    index  index.html index.htm;
    error_page 404 /404.html;
}

location /abc1.html {
    root   /var/www/nginx-default;
    error_page 404 /special_error.html;
}
location /abc2.html {
    root   /var/www/nginx-default;
    error_page 404 /special_error2.html;
}

I am not good with nginx, but I have noticed it depends on the search pattern you give in "location" tag. I have tried different things and those failed . Forexample the above rules will ONLY work for

http://localhost/abc1.html 

and fail for

http://localhost/abc1 

so your "location" search pattern should be good if you want to cover second case. Probably some nginx guru can shed some more light on this. Thanks.