Nginx: add_header not working on 404

I had the following configuration block on an Nginx proxy.

server {
  listen        80 default;
  add_header X-Robots-Tag  noindex;
  ...
}

The idea was to add the X-Robots-Tag header on all requests being served. However, it didn’t work for 404 hits.

$ curl -I "http://domain.tld/does/not/exist"
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
...

… but no add_header was triggered.

Turns out, you need to specify the header should be added always, not just on successfull requests.

server {
  listen        80 default;
  ...

  add_header X-Robots-Tag  noindex always;
  ...
}

This fixes it, by adding always to the end of the add_header directive.