I installed Nginx using Ansible. To install on Centos7 I used the yum package so it by default was run as root user. I want it to start and run as a different user (ex - nginx user) in the Centos box. When I try to run it with a different user I get the following error:
Job for nginx.service failed because the control process exited with
error code. See "systemctl status nginx.service" and "journalctl -xe"
for details.
I know it's not advisable to run as root. So how do I get around this and run nginx as a non root user. Thanks
Add/Change the following in your /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
:
user nginx;
You should create the user and grant permissions on the webroot directories recursively.
This way only master process runs as root
. Because: Only root processes can listen to ports below 1024. A webserver typically runs at port 80 and/or 443. That means it needs to be started as root.
To run master process as non root user:
Change the ownership of the following:
- error_log
- access_log
- pid
- client_body_temp_path
- fastcgi_temp_path
- proxy_temp_path
- scgi_temp_path
- uwsgi_temp_path
Change the listen directives to ports above 1024, log in as desired user and run nginx by nginx -c /path/to/nginx.conf
Just in case it helps, for testing/debugging purpose, I sometimes run an nginx instance as a non privileged user on my Debian (stretch) laptop.
I use a minimal config file like this:
worker_processes 1;
error_log stderr;
daemon off;
pid nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
access_log access.log;
server {
listen 8080;
server_name localhost;
location / {
include /etc/nginx/uwsgi_params;
uwsgi_pass localhost:8081;
}
}
}
and I start the process with:
/usr/sbin/nginx -c nginx.conf -p $PWD