How do I force redirect all 404's (or every page, whether invalid or not) to the homepage?

Question

Currently every invalid page is 500 (Internal Server Error) because I probably messed up with my server block configuration.

I decided to shut down my website a whil

Answer 1

This solution for nginx hosted site:

Edit your virtual hosting file

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/vishnuku.com 

Add this snippet in the server block

# define error page
error_page 404 = @notfound;

# error page location redirect 301
location @notfound {
    return 301 /;
}

In your php block put the fastcgi_intercept_errors set to on

location ~ \.php$ {
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    # intercept errors for 404 redirect
    fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
}

Final code will look like this

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name vishnuku.com;

    root /var/www/nginx/vishnuku.com;
    index index.php index.html;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/vishnuku.com.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/vishnuku.com.error.log;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args /;
    }

    # define error page
    error_page 404 = @notfound;

    # error page location redirect 301
    location @notfound {
        return 301 /;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }

    location = /nginx.conf {
        deny all;
    }
}