nginx: send all requests to a single html page

Using just try_files didn't work for me - it caused a rewrite or internal redirection cycle error in my logs.

The Nginx docs had some additional details:

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#try_files

So I ended up using the following:

root /var/www/mysite;

location / {
    try_files $uri /base.html;
}

location = /base.html {
    expires 30s;
}

This worked for me:

location / {
    alias /path/to/my/indexfile/;
    try_files $uri /index.html;
}

This allowed me to create a catch-all URL for a javascript single-page app. All static files like css, fonts, and javascript built by npm run build will be found if they are in the same directory as index.html.

If the static files were in another directory, for some reason, you'd also need something like:

# Static pages generated by "npm run build"
location ~ ^/css/|^/fonts/|^/semantic/|^/static/ {
    alias /path/to/my/staticfiles/;
}

I think this will do it for you:

location / {
    try_files /base.html =404;
}

Your original rewrite should almost work. I'm not sure why it would be redirecting, but I think what you really want is just

rewrite ^ /base.html break;

You should be able to put that in a location or directly in the server.