Nginx - Customizing 404 page

Nginx+PHP (on fastCGI) works great for me. When I enter a path to a PHP file which doesn't exist, instead of getting the default 404 error page (which comes for any invalid .html file), I simply get a "No input file specified.".

How can I customize this 404 error page?

You can setup a custom error page for every location block in your nginx.conf, or a global error page for the site as a whole.

To redirect to a simple 404 not found page for a specific location:

location /my_blog {
    error_page    404 /blog_article_not_found.html;
}

A site wide 404 page:

server {
    listen 80;
    error_page  404  /website_page_not_found.html;
    ...

You can append standard error codes together to have a single page for several types of errors:

location /my_blog {
    error_page 500 502 503 504 /server_error.html
}

To redirect to a totally different server, assuming you had an upstream server named server2 defined in your http section:

upstream server2 {
    server 10.0.0.1:80;
}
server {
    location /my_blog {
        error_page    404 @try_server2;
    }
    location @try_server2 {
        proxy_pass http://server2;
    }

The manual can give you more details, or you can search google for the terms nginx.conf and error_page for real life examples on the web.

You use the error_page property in the nginx config.

For example, if you intend to set the 404 error page to /404.html, use

error_page 404 /404.html;

Setting the 500 error page to /500.html is just as easy as:

error_page 500 /500.html;

Be careful with the syntax! Great Turtle used them interchangeably, but:

error_page 404 = /404.html;

Will return the 404.html page with a status code of 200 (because = has relayed that to this page)

error_page 404 /404.html;

Will return the 404.html page with a (the original) 404 error code.

https://serverfault.com/questions/295789/nginx-return-correct-headers-with-custom-error-documents

The "error_page" parameter makes a redirect, converting the request method to "GET", it is not a custom response page.

The easiest solution is

     server{
         root /var/www/html;
         location ~ \.php {
            if (!-f $document_root/$fastcgi_script_name){
                return 404;
            }
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            include fastcgi_params.default;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root/$fastcgi_script_name;
        }

By the way, if you want Nginx to process 404 status returned by PHP scripts, you need to add

[fastcgi_intercept_errors][1] on;

E.g.

     location ~ \.php {
            #...
            error_page  404   404.html;
            fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
         }

These answers are no longer recommended since try_files works faster than if in this context. Simply add try_files in your php location block to test if the file exists, otherwise return a 404.

location ~ \.php {
    try_files $uri =404;
    ...
}