Send custom 404 error without changing page

[Igor Sysoev]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 09:16:59AM -0800, Rt Ibmer wrote:

> What is the best way to send a custom 404 error to the browser without it changing the URL on the user?
> 
> For instance I currently have this:
>   error_page  404         /404.php;
> 
> But then the URL in their browser is http://mysite.com/404.php which can be annoying to users because instead of just fixing a typo in the url they now have to retype the url.
> 
> So instead what I want to do is show the content from 404.php but have the browser be on the typo url still. 
> 
> For example let's say the real page is products.php (products, plural) and they type http://mysite.com/product.php (product, singular).
> 
> So now I want their browser to still show http://mysite.com/product.php, but to actually show the 404.php page in the browser.
> 
> What is the best way to do this?
> 
> This is how I have done it now, but I do not like using the -f check because now I feel like nginx has to check the file system on every request to see if a file exists? That seems very inefficient don't you think?
> 
> location ~ .*\.php$ {
>   if (!-f $request_filename) { rewrite . /404.php; }
>   ... other php and fastcgi stuff here
> }
> 
> So again, this does work, but I am concerned about the added overhead of the server checking to see if the file exists on each request.
> 
> Is there a better way? Ideally I would like to do something like this:
> 
>   error_page  404         /404.php noredirect;
> 
> where the "noredirect" (which I just made up) would tell Nginx "hey if you ever need to issue a 404 get the content from 404.php but don't redirect them to the page, instead just feed them the content".  Is this possible?
> 
> The idea is that same except in this later case only when the server finds a page is missing does the action occur. Whereas in the -f case the server has to check for the file in every request, when 99.9% of the time there will be no 404.
> 
> Please let me know your thoughts. Thank you!!

This

   error_page  404         /404.php;

does exactly what you have described: it does internal only redirect
invisible for client.


-- 
Igor Sysoev
http://sysoev.ru/en/