Nginx 301 Redirect all non home page urls to home page

Question

I'm shutting down a site and I need to 301 redirect all pages to the home page where I have a message saying that the site is being closed down.

Basically any http://example.com/anyfolder -> 301 to http://www.example.com

I have the following but this results in a redirection loop.

location ~ ^/([A-z]+) { rewrite ^ / permanent; }

What is the proper way to do this in nginx?

Answer 1

This worked for me. This is assuming you only have a index.html,htm and the other urls are missing the physical file on disk.

server {
  listen      80;
  server_name www.example.com example.com;
  root /u/apps/example/www;
  index index.html;

  location / {
    if (!-e $request_filename) {
      rewrite ^ / permanent;
    }
  }
}