Updating Nginx block to do two things that aren't working - nginx

Question

For Nginx, I'm attempting to do two things:
Redirect anyone who comes in to the site from www to non-www.
The server defaults to error 500 instead of 404 when the URL path doesn't exist.
This is my current configuration of my server:
server {
root /var/www/project/;
index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.0-fpm.sock;
}
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem; # managed$
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem; # manag$
include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot
}
server {
if ($host = www.example.com) {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
} # managed by Certbot
if ($host = example.com) {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
} # managed by Certbot
listen 80;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
return 404; # managed by Certbot
}
I attempted adding a forward for any www traffic to move into non-www but that didn't do anything (I think because of certbot). Also I tried to update the URL for returning 404 instead of 500, but what it did was it made anything outside of the homepage a 404. So I reset it to what you see above.

Answer 1

Redirect anyone who comes in to the site from www to non-www.
The cleanest solution is to define a separate server block only for this purpose:
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.example.com;
return 301 http://example.com$request_uri;
}
You can verify that it works by putting
127.0.0.1 localhost example.com www.example.com
in your computer's hosts file.
$ curl -I http://www.example.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2021 06:14:43 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 162
Connection: keep-alive
Location: http://example.com/
The server defaults to error 500 instead of 404 when the URL path doesn't exist.
The 500 HTTP status code is probably caused by your index.php script.