How to grant nginx permissions to phpMyAdmin on synology diskstation - nginx

Question

I have a Synology Diskstation DS216se running DSM 6.2.3-25426. I've installed MariaDB 10, Web Station, PHP 7.2, and myPhpAdmin, but when I open it at http://diskstation/phpMyAdmin/ I get this error message
"Sorry, the page you are looking for is not found."
I'm using an nginx server in Web Station, and the error log at /var/log/nginx/error.log contains multiple entries like the following
*621 open() "/var/services/web/phpMyAdmin/js/vendor/jquery/jquery.debounce-1.0.5.js" failed (13: Permission denied)
The file, and all other files with permission denied entries in the logs, exist in the /var/services/web/phpMyAdmin/ directory - what permissions need to be granted to the directory for this to succeed?

Answer 1

I hit this as well. I managed to recover, but it effectively amounts to hard clearing any evidence of prior installs of Web Station, PHP 7.2, phpMyAdmin, and any other web related services. Then manually ripping out some bad directories with broken symlinks/permissions.
My hypothesis is that I tried to install adminer prior to this and - having not done any set up for Web Station et. al. - it put the filesystem in a bad state.
I am not willing to try installing adminer again to test this hypothesis.
What I did to fix this:
Backup what you need (e.g., any personal web site).
SSH into your diskstation. Please be aware of what you are doing and keep in mind the big picture. Don't go deleting random things.
Uninstall Web Station, PHP 7.2, Apache, phpMyAdmin, etc. Anything that Web Station would ultimately be inclined to read and serve up.
Verify that /var/services/web doesn't contain anything you care about, and delete it (sudo rm -rf /var/services/web).
Verify that /volume1/web doesn't contain anything you care about, and delete everything inside it (sudo rm -rf /var/services/web). You may need to chmod permissions for this - I ended up leaving the web directory itself intact, but nothing inside.
Reboot. Mount any encrypted disks, etc.
Check that /var/services/web now shows it is symlinked to /volume1/web, e.g. sudo readlink -e /var/services/web.
Also check permissions for /volume1/web, e.g. ls -al /volume1. It should be owned by root:root and have permissive (777) bits.
Install Web Station, PHP 7.2, and phpMyAdmin in that order.
After this, I could open phpMyAdmin and be served its log in screen.
Debugging notes:
For me, when I SSH in I see in the logs similar issues:
2020/12/17 10:36:35 [error] 32658#32658: *1028 "/var/services/web/phpMyAdmin/index.php" is forbidden (13: Permission denied),
ps says that the nginx workers run as the http user (uid=1023(http) gid=1023(http) groups=1023(http)).
The directory /var/services/web/ appears to be owned by root, both group and user:
# ls -al /var/services/web/
total 424
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 17 10:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 17 10:22 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27959 Apr 13 2016 adminer.css
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 82 Apr 13 2016 .htaccess
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 387223 Apr 13 2016 index.php
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Dec 17 10:29 phpMyAdmin
It's not clear to me how Web Station's nginx is intended to work at all given the mismatch - perhaps some set of actions I took prior caused it to decide to install with bad ownership.
I decided to leave everything owned by root, but changed group permissions so that http can access:
# chown -R root:http /var/services/web/
# chmod -R 775 /var/services/web/
This got past the initial error, but revealed a new one:
"/usr/syno/synoman/phpMyAdmin/index.cgi" is not found (2: No such file or directory)
Indeed, there was no trace of phpMyAdmin anywhere in that directory. Evidence of a bad install.
I decided to uninstall anything web related: phpMyAdmin, PHP 7, Apache (happened to be installed), nginx, and Web Station. Once I did, I still had two files in /var/services/web: adminer.css index.php.
I had tried adminer prior to this. In /var/services, there were symlinks to specific volume locations, e.g.:
# ls -al /var/services/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 17 10:22 .
drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 4096 Dec 17 10:21 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Jan 20 2020 download -> /volume1/#download
lrwxrwxrwx+ 1 root root 14 Dec 17 10:22 homes -> /volume1/homes
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Jan 20 2020 pgsql -> /volume1/#database/pgsql
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Dec 17 10:22 tmp -> /volume1/#tmp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Dec 17 10:22 web
Interestingly, web was not symlinked. I fully deleted /var/services/web.
Looking over at /volume1, I do see a /volume1/web, again fully owned by root but with extremely constrained permission:
d---------+ 1 root root 52 Dec 17 10:14 web
There are only a few things in here, which look related to a blank install of Web Station. I fully deleted everything within /volume1/web, but left it as is. With everything maximally cleaned I rebooted.
Upon boot, /var/services/web was now symlinked to /volume1/web, which now also had useful permission bits (777), and owned by root:root. Maybe this was done by some boot recover process, who knows. (I still have nothing web related installed at this point.)
I installed Web Station, then PHP 7.2, then phpMyAdmin.

Answer 2

I had the same issue when accessing my server via
<name>.local/phpMyAdmin/
It worked when I accessed it via
<local ip>/phpMyAdmin/