Nginx causes 301 redirect if there’s no trailing slash

I posted a possible solution to this problem on serverfault; reproduced here for convenience:

If I understand the question correctly, you want to automatically serve, without using a 301 redirect, http://example.com/foo/index.html when the request is for http://example.com/foo with no trailing slash?

Basic solution that works for me

If so I’ve found this try_files configuration to work:

try_files $uri $uri/index.html $uri/ =404;

• The first $uri matches the uri exactly
• The second $uri/index.html matches a directory containing the index.html where the last element of the path matches the directory
  name, with no trailing slash
• The third $uri/ matches the directory
• The fourth =404 returns the 404 error page if none of the preceding patterns match.

Taken from Serverfault answer

My updated version

If you add in the server block:

index index.html index.htm;

And modify try_files to look like this:

try_files $uri $uri/ =404;

It should work too.