The solution as usual is super simple. The problem I was having was that when you didn’t put a trailing slash on a url, it would not handle it and throw a 404. I saw lots of fixes with complex re-write rules, but it turns out that a simple fix for me was to add this to my .conf file:
# http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpCoreModule#server_name_in_redirect
server_name_in_redirect off;
So your *.conf would look like this
server { listen 80; server_name localhost; ... server_name_in_redirect off; ... }