Question

I’m working on a website, and if the user isn’t authenticated or doesn’t have permission to view the specified page, I want to throw the standard 404 page. I’ve done a little bit of looking, but no luck. Obviously I could just copy the HTML, but I’d rather not. I’d rather use the actual 404 page that nginx uses, if possible.

Where can I find this?

Answer 1

Run nginx -V and look for the path defined by --prefix=/prefix/path/to/nginx.

You will find the default 404 file as 404.html under /prefix/path/to/nginx/html

A better way to editing the default file when you want custom error pages is to add a block such as this to your nginx.conf file under the http section

error_page 400 /error_docs/400_bad_request.html;
error_page 401 /error_docs/401_unauthorized.html;
error_page 403 /error_docs/403_forbidden.html;
error_page 404 /error_docs/404_not_found.html;
error_page 405 /error_docs/405_method_not_allowed.html;
error_page 406 /error_docs/406_not_acceptable.html;
error_page 407 /error_docs/407_proxy_authentication_required.html;
error_page 412 /error_docs/412_precondition_failed.html;
error_page 415 /error_docs/415_unsupported_media_type.html;
error_page 500 /error_docs/500_internal_server_error.html;
error_page 501 /error_docs/501_not_implemented.html;
error_page 502 /error_docs/502_bad_gateway.html;
error_page 504 /error_docs/504_gateway_timeout.html;

This basically says use /error_docs/404_not_found.html if a 404 error is generated. You obviously define those for which you want to make a specific custom page

You can then save the 404_not_found.html file somewhere on your server such as /prefix/path/to/nginx/errors and then, under each server section, add something like

server {

    ...

    location /error_docs {
        internal;
        alias /prefix/path/to/nginx/errors;
    }

    ...

}

Whenever any of the previously defined error codes are thrown, the predefined custom page will be served.