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

Question

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:

Answer 1

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.