Nginx: Rewrite from base domain to a sub directory

location = / {
    rewrite ^ http://site.com/blog/ redirect;
}

This'll just do requests specifically for the root. If you need to catch everything (redirect http://site.com/somearticle/something.html to http://site.com/blog/somearticle/something.html), then you'll need something more involved:

location /blog/ {
    # Empty; this is just here to avoid redirecting for this location,
    # though you might already have some config in a block like this.
}
location / {
    rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://site.com/blog/$1 redirect;
}

try this instead:

location = / {
      return 301 /blog/;
 }

The key here is '=' symbol.

This has not worked for me. This is what has worked:

1. Open the NGINX configuration file for your site. Inside of the server block, add the path to your root directory and set the priority order for files:

   root /mnt/www/www.domainname.com;
   index  index.php index.html index.htm;
   

2. Create an empty location block before all your other location blocks:

   location /latest {
   # Nothing in here; this is to avoid redirecting for this location
   }
   

3. Comment out the root directory directive in your location / {} block and add the redirection so it looks like this:

   location / {
   # root   /mnt/www/www.domainname.com;
   index  index.php index.html index.htm;
   rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://www.domainname.com/latest/$1 redirect;
   }
   

4. Make sure that your location ~ .php$ block points its root to

   root /mnt/www/www.domainname.com;
   

This fixed it for me.

for the just the home page and nothing else, i would use:

location / {           
    rewrite ^/$ /blog/ redirect;
}

anything else, like /foo/ would not be redirected to /blog/ .