Why aren't my sub pages loading when they are in location blocks in the nginx configuration?

I have a certain subdomain: /var/www/test.domain.com. Now I would like to have multiple pages, so an /about page and a /contact page for example. The homepage works just fine. For some reason I cannot get these subpages to load.

Currently I have 3 files in my /var/www/test.domain.com folder

• index.html
• about.html
• contact.html

I was under the impression that I did not have to create different location blocks for all my subpages, but I am not sure about this. My 'default' location block looked like this:

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
  }

However, since that did not work, I also tried this:

server {
  root /var/www/test.domain.com;
  server_name test.domain.com;
  listen 443 ssl;
  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain.com/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain.com/privkey.pem;
  if ($scheme != "https") {
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
  } # managed by Certbot
  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
  }
  location /about {
    root /var/www/test.domain.com;
    index about.html;
  }
  location /contact {
    root /var/www/test.domain.com;
    index contact.html;
  }
}

I restart nginx but the /about page and /contact page returns a 404. What seems to be the problem?

To return the about.html file with the URL /about - you could use a $uri.html term in the try_files statement.

For example:

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404;
}