Django only serves index page, 404 on all others - django

Question

I have a simple django app im trying to throw up on digital ocean. I have configured NGINX to proxy my port and serve the static files. However, when I click on any link to go to another page, it 404s on me. It only serves the index page correctly, everything else is a 404.
If any of you back-end wizards have any other do's/don't's that i'm currently doing, feel free to add those in your response.
I'm very new to NGINX so please dumb it down :) Thanks.
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
index index.html index.htm;
# Make site accessible from http://localhost/
server_name localhost;
location /static {
alias /home/rchampin/ryan_the_developer_django/static;
}
location / {
# First attempt to serve request as file, then
# as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
# Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location
# include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules
}
}

Answer 1

You've explicitly instructed nginx to return 404 on non file requests. You don't need to do this. Django can manage Error 404s. You only need to add a 404.html in your template directory and Django will have this page shown when there's a 404 Not Found Error.
Plus you don't need to hard code your index page, what's the point of using Django. Michał Karzyński has a very good documentation on how to setup Nginx with Django:
Setting up Django with Nginx, Gunicorn, virtualenv, supervisor and PostgreSQL