Originally, I have something like this in the nginx.conf file. location ^~ /test_api { types { application/json json; } root /usr/local/www/data; rewrite "/test_api/(.*)" /api_response/test_api_$1.json break; error_page 404 /api_response/unknown_request.json; } When a requested resource is not found locally, unknown_request.json (default response) is returned correctly. Then I had to change the rewrite to point to a remote server as follows: rewrite "/test_api/(.*)" $scheme://www.somedomain.com/test_api_$1 break; It doesn't return unknown_request.json (default response) anymore even though the remote server returns a 404. Is there a way to continue to return unknown_request.json to the client when the remote server returns a 404 assuming the remote server can't be changed to return unknown_request.json? Thanks very much.