Nginx serve static file and got 403 forbidden - nginx

Question

Just want to help somebody out. yes ,you just want to serve static file using nginx, and you got everything right in nginx.conf:
location /static {
autoindex on;
#root /root/downloads/boxes/;
alias /root/downloads/boxes/;
}
But , in the end , you failed. You got "403 forbidden" from browser...
----------------------------------------The Answer Below:----------------------------------------
The Solution is very Simple:
Way 1 : Run nginx as the user as the '/root/downloads/boxes/' owner
In nginx.conf :
＃user nobody;
worker_processes 1;
#error_log logs/error.log;
#error_log logs/error.log notice;
YES, in the first line "＃user noboy;" , just delete "#" , and change "nobody" to your own username in Linux/OS X, i.e change to "root" for test. The restart nginx.
Attention , You'd better not run nginx as root! Here just for testing, it's dangerous for the Hacker.
For more reference , see nginx (engine X) – What a Pain in the BUM! [13: Permission denied]
Way 2 : Change '/root/downloads/boxes/' owner to 'www-data' or 'nobody'
In Terminal:
ps aux | grep nginx
Get the username of running nginx . It should be 'www-data' or 'nobody' determined by the version of nginx. Then hit in Terminal(use 'www-data' for example):
chown -R www-data:www-data /root/downloads/boxes/
------------------------------One More Important Thing Is:------------------------------
These parent directories "/", "/root", "/root/downloads" should give the execute(x) permission to 'www-data' or 'nobody'. i.e.
ls -al /root
chmod o+x /root
chmod o+x /root/downloads
For more reference , see Resolving "403 Forbidden" error and Nginx 403 forbidden for all files

Answer 1

You should give nginx permissions to read the file. That means you should give the user that runs the nginx process permissions to read the file.
This user that runs the nginx process is configurable with the user directive in the nginx config, usually located somewhere on the top of nginx.conf:
user www-data
http://wiki.nginx.org/CoreModule#user
The second argument you give to user is the group, but if you don't specify it, it uses the same one as the user, so in my example the user and the group both are www-data.
Now the files you want to serve with nginx should have the correct permissions. Nginx should have permissions to read the files. You can give the group www-data read permissions to a file like this:
chown :www-data my-file.html
http://linux.die.net/man/1/chown
With chown you can change the user and group owner of a file. In this command I only change the group, if you would change the user too you would specify the username before the colon, like chown www-data:www-data my-file.html. But setting the group permissions correct should be enough for nginx to be able to read the file.

Answer 2

Since Nginx is handling the static files directly, it needs access to
the appropriate directories. We need to give it executable permissions for our home directory.
The safest way to do this is to add the Nginx user to our own user group. We can then add the executable permission to the group owners of our home directory, giving just enough access for Nginx to serve the files:
CentOS / Fedora
sudo usermod -a -G your_user nginx
chmod 710 /home/your_user
Set SELinux to globally permissive mode, run:
sudo setenforce 0
for more info, please visit
https://www.nginx.com/blog/using-nginx-plus-with-selinux/
Ubuntu / Debian
sudo usermod -a -G your_user www-data
sudo chown -R :www-data /path/to/your/static/folder

Answer 3

for accepted answer
sudo chown -R :www-data static_folder
for changing group owner of all files in that folder

Answer 4

For me is was SElinux, I had to run the following: (RHEL/Centos on AWS)
sudo setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect on
chcon -Rt httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/

Answer 5

I ran into this issue with a Django project. Changing user permissions and groups didn't work. However, moving the entire static folder from my project to /var/www did.
Copy your project static files to /var/www/static
# cp -r /project/static /var/www/static
Point nginx to proper directory
# sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server;
server_name _;
location /static/ {
root /var/www;
}
location / {
include proxy_params;
proxy_pass http://unix:/run/gunicorn.sock;
}
}
Test nginx config and reload
# sudo nginx -t
# sudo systemctl reload nginx

Answer 6

After digging into very useful answers decided to collect everything related to permissions as a recipe. Specifically, the simplest solution with maximal security (=minimal permissions).
Suppose we deploy the site as user admin, that is, she owns site dir and everything within. We do not want to run nginx as this user (too many permissions). It's OK for testing, not for prod.
By default Nginx runs workers as a user nginx, that is, config contains line user nginx
By default user nginx is in the group with the same name: nginx.
We want to give minimal permissions to user nginx without changing file ownership. This seems to be the most secure of naive options.
In order to serve static files, the minimal required permissions in the folders hierarchy (see the group permissions) should be like this (use the command namei -l /home/admin/WebProject/site/static/hmenu.css):
dr-xr-xr-x root root /
drwxr-xr-x root root home
drwxr-x--- admin nginx admin
drwx--x--- admin nginx WebProject
drwx--x--- admin nginx site
drwx--x--- admin nginx static
-rwxr----- admin nginx hmenu.css
Next, how to get this beautiful picture? To change group ownership for dirs, we first apply sudo chown :nginx /home/admin/WebProject/site/static and then repeat the command stripping dirs from the right one-by-one.
To change permissions for dirs, we apply sudo chmod g+x /home/admin/WebProject/site/static and again strip dirs.
Change group for the files in the /static dir: sudo chown -R :nginx /home/admin/WebProject/site/static
Finally, change permissions for the files in the /static dir: sudo chmod g+r /home/admin/WebProject/site/static/*
(Of course one can create a dedicated group and change the user name, but this would obscure the narration with unimportant details.)

Answer 7

Setting user root in nginx can be really dangerous. Having to set permissions to all file hierarchy can be cumbersome (imagine the folder's full path is under more than 10 subfolders).
What I'd do is to mirror the folder you want to share, under /usr/share/nginx/any_folder_name with permissions for nginx's configured user (usually www-data). That you can do with bindfs.
In your case I would do:
sudo bindfs -u www-data -g www-data /root/downloads/boxes/ /usr/share/nginx/root_boxes
It will mount /root/downloads/boxes into /usr/share/nginx/root_boxes with all permissions for user www-data. Now you set that path in your location block config
location /static {
autoindex on;
alias /usr/share/nginx/root_boxes/;
}

Answer 8

Try the accepted answer by #gitaarik, and if it still gives 403 Forbidden or 404 Not Found and your location target is / read on.
I also experienced this issue, but none of the permission changes mentioned above solved my problem. It was solved by adding the root directive because I was defining the root location (/) and accidentally used the alias directive when I should have used the root directive.
The configuration is accepted, but gives 403 Forbidden, or 404 Not Found if auto-indexing is enabled for /:
location / {
alias /my/path/;
index index.html;
}
Correct definition:
location / {
root /my/path/;
index index.html;
}

Answer 9

You can just do like what is did:
CentOS / Fedora
sudo usermod -a -G your_user_name nginx
chmod 710 /home/your_user_name
Ubuntu / Debian
sudo usermod -a -G your_user_name www-data
sudo chown -R :www-data /path/to/your/static_folder
And in your nginx file that serve your site make sure that your location for static is like this:
location /static/ {
root /path/to/your/static_folder;
}

Answer 10

I bang my head on this 403 problem for quite some time.
I'm using CentOS from DigitalOcean.
I thought to fix the problem was just to set SELINUX=disabled in /etc/selinux/config but I was wrong. Somehow, I screwed my droplet.
This works for me!
sudo chown nginx:nginx /var/www/mydir

Answer 11

My nginx is run as nginx user and nginx group, but add nginx group to public folder not work for me.
I check the permission as a nginx user.
su nginx -s /bin/bash
I found the I need to add the group for the full path. My path is start at /root, so I need to do following:
chown -R :nginx /root