For me, the try_files directive in the (currently most voted) answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/11957896/608359 led to rewrite cycles,
*173 rewrite or internal redirection cycle while internally redirecting
I had better luck with the index directive. Note that I used a forward slash before the name, which might or might not be what you want.
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name example.com;
root /home/dclo/example;
index /index.html;
error_page 404 /index.html;
# ... ssl configuration
}
In this case, I wanted all paths to lead to /index.html, including when returning a 404.