getting a 500 internl server error with nginx?

i have installed nginx on my ubuntu ec2 instance and im building an app using node.js, and when i go my amazon url i.e.

http://elastic.ip.address

it works fine, so its running the / file:

app.get('/', function(req, res) {
    return res.render('home');
  });

however when i try go to http://elastic.ip.address/page2:

    app.get('/page2', function(req, res) {
    return res.render('page2');

  });

I get the 500 internal server error, so i really don't know whats happening, this works on my localhost without running nginx, but not my ec2.

this is my nginx configuration file layout:

server {
        listen   80;

        root /home/ubuntu/project/;



        server_name  static_ip.compute-1.amazonaws.com;


        location / {
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to index.html
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
                # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location
                # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules
                proxy_pass      http://127.0.0.1:8124/;
        }