The nginx documentation states that a common use for the ‘=’ modifier is for handling requests to ‘/’. Using ‘= /’ in the location directive can expedite processing since it halts the match search after the first comparison. Here’s an example:

location = / {
    #...
}

My configuration was:

location / {
    root /usr/share/nginx/html/data/www;
    index index.html index.htm;
}

This configuration worked well, but modifying it to:

location = / {
    root /usr/share/nginx/html/data/www;
    index index.html index.htm;
}

resulted in a 404 error. The error log indicated:

open() “/etc/nginx/html/index.html” failed (2: No such file or directory).

How can I fix it