Angular 2 How to redirect to 404 or other path if the path does not exist

As shaishab roy says, in the cheat sheet you can find the answer.

But in his answer, the given response was :

{path: '/home/...', name: 'Home', component: HomeComponent}
{path: '/', redirectTo: ['Home']},
{path: '/user/...', name: 'User', component: UserComponent},
{path: '/404', name: 'NotFound', component: NotFoundComponent},

{path: '/*path', redirectTo: ['NotFound']}

For some reasons, it doesn't works on my side, so I tried instead :

{path: '/**', redirectTo: ['NotFound']}

and it works. Be careful and don't forget that you need to put it at the end, or else you will often have the 404 error page ;).

For version v2.2.2 and newer

In version v2.2.2 and up, name property no longer exists and it shouldn't be used to define the route. path should be used instead of name and no leading slash is needed on the path. In this case use path: '404' instead of path: '/404':

 {path: '404', component: NotFoundComponent},
 {path: '**', redirectTo: '/404'}

For versions older than v2.2.2

you can use {path: '/*path', redirectTo: ['redirectPathName']}:

{path: '/home/...', name: 'Home', component: HomeComponent}
{path: '/', redirectTo: ['Home']},
{path: '/user/...', name: 'User', component: UserComponent},
{path: '/404', name: 'NotFound', component: NotFoundComponent},

{path: '/*path', redirectTo: ['NotFound']}

if no path matches then redirect to NotFound path

As Angular moved on with the release, I faced this same issue. As per version 2.1.0 the Route interface looks like:

export interface Route {
    path?: string;
    pathMatch?: string;
    component?: Type<any>;
    redirectTo?: string;
    outlet?: string;
    canActivate?: any[];
    canActivateChild?: any[];
    canDeactivate?: any[];
    canLoad?: any[];
    data?: Data;
    resolve?: ResolveData;
    children?: Route[];
    loadChildren?: LoadChildren;
} 

So my solutions was the following:

const routes: Routes = [
    { path: '', component: HomeComponent },
    { path: '404', component: NotFoundComponent },
    { path: '**', redirectTo: '404' }
];

My preferred option on 2.0.0 and up is to create a 404 route and also allow a ** route path to resolve to the same component. This allows you to log and display more information about the invalid route rather than a plain redirect which can act to hide the error.

Simple 404 example:

{ path '/', component: HomeComponent },
// All your other routes should come first    
{ path: '404', component: NotFoundComponent },
{ path: '**', component: NotFoundComponent }

To display the incorrect route information add in import to router within NotFoundComponent:

import { Router } from '@angular/router';

Add it to the constructior of NotFoundComponent:

constructor(public router: Router) { }

Then you're ready to reference it from your HTML template e.g.

The page <span style="font-style: italic">{{router.url}}</span> was not found.