Nginx serve static file and got 403 forbidden

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

for accepted answer

sudo chown -R :www-data static_folder

for changing group owner of all files in that folder

Answer 2

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 3

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:

sudo usermod -a -G your_user nginx

chmod 710 /home/your_user

Answer 4

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).

1. 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.
2. By default Nginx runs workers as a user nginx, that is, config contains line user nginx
3. By default user nginx is in the group with the same name: nginx.
4. We want to give minimal permissions to user nginx without changing file ownership. This seems to be the most secure of naive options.

5. 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

6. 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.

7. To change permissions for dirs, we apply sudo chmod g+x /home/admin/WebProject/site/static and again strip dirs.

8. Change group for the files in the /static dir: sudo chown -R :nginx /home/admin/WebProject/site/static

9. 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.)