NGINX location configuration - web-services

Question

Right now I have set up NGINX and had a question regarding the url paths and how NGINX approaches it. Right now, if I do something like /sample.html, it will effectively display sample.html. However, I want to do something where irregardless of what the user inputs in the URL, it displays sample.html. For example, doing something like /network will still display sample.html but will retain the url path of /network. Right now, this is how my NGINX.conf looks like:
worker_processes 2;
pid logs/nginx.pid;
error_log syslog:server=unix:/dev/log,facility=local7,tag=nginx,severity=error;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
access_log syslog:server=unix:/dev/log,facility=local7,tag=nginx,severity=info combined;
sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
root /home/user/Downloads/nginx/html;
location /network {
index sample.html sample.htm;
}
location / {
index sample.html sample.htm;
autoindex on;
}
#error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root html;
}
}
}
I thought this would work but it is just returning a 404 error. Any idea on how I can change this so that it would work in how I want it to work, if it is possible?
Thank you, and let me know if you need more information!

Answer 1

You could use try_files to accomplish this within a location block. See http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#try_files
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /sample.html;
}