Redirect 404's within a certain directory to index.php

Question

I'm trying to redirect all 404 messages to the index page, but only within certain directories/categories.

For example

404's within the following dir's will display as normal

www.foo.com/

www.foo.com/blah

404's in the following dir's will redirect to index.php

www.foo.com/bar

www.foo.com/fizz/buzz

So far I've found that the following will redirect all 404's to the index page with an OK status.

error_page 404 =200 /index.html 

Is it possible to do this directory specifc?

Answer 1

As in the first comment, error_page can be defined in location level.

location ^~ /baz { error_page /index.html; } 

Old answer or another way to achieve this: You need to use try_files for this. Name is obvious. Nginx tries to open for given path if exists. if can't find, it tries the next. So your rule should look like this.