Nginx redirect all 403 to 404

http-status-code-403http-status-code-404nginx

I'm trying to get 403 responses to be exactly identical to 404 ones.

Not sure if there's a proper way to do it, but setting
error_page 403 404
is my current method.

Which works, but it rewrites the url to mysite.com/404 for 403's
while regular 404's leave the url alone.

Oh and I don't have any 4XX custom pages set up and I deleted the default nginx one.

Best Answer

The nginx documentation clearly says that if you want to change the response code, you use =response. For example:

error_page 403 =404 /url;

Note that making this change requires specifying a URL to serve, so you'll have to make something up.

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Turn out my first answer to this question was correct at certain time, but it turned into another pitfall - to stay up to date please check Taxing rewrite pitfalls

I have been corrected by many SE users, so the credit goes to them, but more importantly, here is the correct code:

server {
       listen         80;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       return         301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
       listen         443 ssl;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       # add Strict-Transport-Security to prevent man in the middle attacks
       add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" always; 

       [....]
}

NGINX returning 404 error on a valid url

From OP:

It was a problem with the config file; I was conditionally setting expiration headers and disabling logging for images, js, css, ico files, etc. I had:
  location ~* ^.+(jpeg|jpg|gif|css|png|js|ico)${
and changed it to:
  location ~* \.(jpeg|jpg|gif|css|png|js|ico)${
Now when I request a url that ends in one of those strings, it parses it as a url, and not as a file, so no more 404 errors.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

NGINX Redirect – How to Rewrite All HTTP Requests to HTTPS While Maintaining Sub-Domain

Correct way in new versions of nginx

NGINX returning 404 error on a valid url

Related Topic