Nginx + WordPress, 404 errors for all pages?

By mkyong | Updated: April 14, 2020

Viewed: 6,904 (+26 pv/w)

Tags: 404 nginx wordpress

We installed Nginx, MariaDB, PHP, and WordPress on Mac OS. The homepage is displayed fine, but all other pages are returning 404 errors?

Tested with

• Nginx 1.17.9
• WordPress 5.4
• PHP 7.4

Review the current Nginx + WordPress integration.

server {
    listen       8080;
    server_name  localhost;

    root /usr/local/var/www/wordpress;

    location / {
        index  index.html index.htm index.php;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index  index.php;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include        fastcgi_params;
    }

}

1. Solution

To fix it, add try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args; in the location / and reload the Nginx’s config file.

location / {
    # file ($uri) or directory ($uri/)? if not, redirect to /index.php + query string
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    index  index.html index.htm index.php;
}

Below is a working nginx.conf on our test machine.

user mkyong staff;

worker_processes  2;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    server {
        listen       8080;
        server_name  localhost;

        error_log  /usr/local/var/log/nginx/error.log;
        access_log  /usr/local/var/log/nginx/access.log main;

        root /usr/local/var/www/wordpress;

        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
            index  index.html index.htm index.php;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
            try_files $uri =404;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

    }

}

Reload the Nginx config file.

$ nginx -s reload

References

• Nginx try_files doc
• Installing WordPress with NGINX Unit
• 9 Tips for Improving WordPress Performance