How to configure 404s when using LEMP (Nginx) and WordPress

Question

With my WordPress sites on DO VPS, when a 404 is reached the nginx 404 page is displayed rather than the WordPress one I would expect.

All the results in Google are quite old and relate to using permalinks and then the site 404ing. I am delighted to say that WordPress permalinks are working fine with my sites so its not connected to that.

Any suggestions?

pablo · Answer

Weird. Does WP act normal in all other respects? If so, then the only thing that I can think of is…

If you’re running Ubuntu, look in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled Then, execute cat [yoursite]

Do you have a line that reads error_page 404 /404.html;? If so, change the location to your WordPress directory that contains the 404 page you want.

mrdikaap · Answer

nano /usr/local/apps/nginx/etc/conf.d/webuzoVH.conf # DO NOT EDIT. AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED BY WEBUZO. server { listen 80; server_name tutorialcentos.com www.yourdomain.com; # The Document Root root /home/user/public_html; error_log /usr/local/apps/nginx/var/log/yourdomain.com.err; access_log /usr/local/apps/nginx/var/log/yourdomain.com.log main; include /usr/local/apps/nginx/etc/conf.d/common; try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args; }

Ben Bishop · Answer

Hi thanks both of you for your responses. @Pablo I didn’t want to have to explicitly set each 404 for my sites incase the theme changed.

I realised I was explicitly requesting Nginx to handle the 404 pages rather than let WordPress handle them. I had the following set in my conf for each site in sites-enabled.

fastcgi_intercept_errors on;

http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpFastcgiModule#fastcgi_intercept_errors

Setting this to off (+ removing the redundant ‘location’ for the 404) resolved this issue for me. Thanks again both.

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How to configure 404s when using LEMP (Nginx) and WordPress

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How to configure 404s when using LEMP (Nginx) and WordPress