How to set index.html as root file in Nginx?

How to set index.html for the domain name e.g. https://www.example.com/ - leads user to index.html in root directory.

I've tried different things like:

server {
    # some configs
    
    location = / {
            index index.html;
            fastcgi_index index.html;
    }
or 
    location / {
            index index.html;
            fastcgi_index index.html;
    }

}

Nothing helped me.

There are some other configs with location keyword, though I'd commented them either.

Other "location" configs in the server { clause:

location ~ .*(css|htc|js|bmp|jp?g|gif|ico|cur|png|swf|htm?|html)$ {
        access_log off;
        root $www_root;
}

location ~ \.php$
{
        include                         /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        index                           index.html;
        fastcgi_index                   index.html;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME   $www_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING      $query_string;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO         $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_pass                    127.0.0.1:9000;
        # Директива определяет что ответы FastCGI-сервера с кодом больше или равные 400
        # перенаправлять на обработку nginx'у с помощью директивы error_page
        fastcgi_intercept_errors        on;
        break;
}

location ~ /\.ht {
    deny all;
}

All them were commented and uncommented, but nothing helped.

PS Editions were made in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/domainname.com file.

in your location block you can do:

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

which will tell ngingx to look for a file with the exact name given first, and if none such file is found it will try uri/index.html. So if a request for https://www.example.com/ comes it it would look for an exact file match first, and not finding that would then check for index.html

location / { is the most general location (with location {). It will match anything, AFAIU. I doubt that it would be useful to have location / { index index.html; } because of a lot of duplicate content for every subdirectory of your site.

The approach with

> try_files $uri $uri/index.html index.html;

is bad, as mentioned in a comment above, because it returns index.html for pages which should not exist on your site (any possible $uri will end up in that). Also, as mentioned in an answer above, there is an internal redirect in the last argument of try_files.

Your approach

> location = / { > index index.html;

is also bad, since index makes an internal redirect too. In case you want that, you should be able to handle that in a specific location. Create e.g.

location = /index.html {

as was proposed here. But then you will have a working link http://example.org/index.html, which may be not desired. Another variant, which I use, is:

root /www/my-root;

# http://example.org
# = means exact location
location = / {
    try_files /index.html =404;
}

# disable http://example.org/index as a duplicate content
location = /index      { return 404; }

# This is a general location. 
# (e.g. http://example.org/contacts <- contacts.html)
location / {
    # use fastcgi or whatever you need here
    # return 404 if doesn't exist
    try_files $uri.html =404;
}

P.S. It's extremely easy to debug nginx (if your binary allows that). Just add into the server { block:

error_log /var/log/nginx/debug.log debug;

and see there all internal redirects etc.

The answer is to place the root dir to the location directives:

root   /srv/www/ducklington.org/public_html;

According to the documentation Checks the existence of files in the specified order and uses the first found file for request processing; the processing is performed in the current context. The path to a file is constructed from the file parameter according to the root and alias directives. It is possible to check directory’s existence by specifying a slash at the end of a name, e.g. “$uri/”. If none of the files were found, an internal redirect to the uri specified in the last parameter is made. Important

> an internal redirect to the uri specified in the last parameter is > made.

So in last parameter you should add your page or code if first two parameters returns false.

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

For me, the try_files directive in the (currently most voted) answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/11957896/608359 led to rewrite cycles,

*173 rewrite or internal redirection cycle while internally redirecting

I had better luck with the index directive. Note that I used a forward slash before the name, which might or might not be what you want.

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name example.com;

  root /home/dclo/example;
  index /index.html;
  error_page 404 /index.html;

  # ... ssl configuration
}

In this case, I wanted all paths to lead to /index.html, including when returning a 404.

Add this to the location block in nginx works for me

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html =404;

thats the entire block

location / {
  expires -1;
  add_header Pragma "no-cache";
  add_header Cache-Control "no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0";
  root /var/www
  try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html =404;
}