Question

502 Bad Gateway error for Ghost after setting up server block for static site and restarting Nginx.

Hello there,

I recently installed Ghost via the One Click Application and tried to host it on a subdomain blog.my-domain.com. I created an Nginx server block for the static site to point to www.my-domain.com which is working fine. But when I try to access the Ghost Blog I get a 502 Bad Gateway error.

The two directories configured to serve the websites are:

  1. /var/www/ghost for the blog which was there by default
  2. /var/www/my-domain.com/html for the static website

The server block config file for ghost is at /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ghost

server {
	listen 80;
	listen [::]:80;

	root /var/www/ghost;
	index index.html index.htm;

	server_name blog.my-domain.com www.blog.my-domain.com;
	
    	location / {
        	proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        	proxy_set_header HOST $http_host;
        	proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;
       		proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
       		proxy_redirect off;
   	 }
}

The server block config for the static site is at /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/my-domain.com

server {
	listen 80 default_server;
	listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

	root /var/www/my-domain.com/html;
	index index.html index.htm;
	server_name my-domain.com www.my-domain.com;

	location / {
		try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
	}
}

The Ghost config.js file which is at /var/www/ghost/ contains

var path = require('path'),
    config;

config = {
    // ### Production
    // When running Ghost in the wild, use the production environment.
    // Configure your URL and mail settings here
    production: {
        url: 'http://blog.my-domain.com',
        mail: {},
        database: {
            client: 'sqlite3',
            connection: {
                filename: path.join(__dirname, '/content/data/ghost.db')
            },
            debug: false
        },

        server: {
            host: '127.0.0.1',
            port: '2368'
        }
    },

        // #### Database
        // Ghost supports sqlite3 (default), MySQL & PostgreSQL
        database: {
            client: 'sqlite3',
            connection: {
                filename: path.join(__dirname, '/content/data/ghost-dev.db')
            },
            debug: false
        },
        // #### Server
        // Can be host & port (default), or socket
        server: {
            // Host to be passed to node's `net.Server#listen()`
            host: '127.0.0.1',
            // Port to be passed to node's `net.Server#listen()`, for iisnode set this to `process.env.PORT`
            port: '2368'
        },
        // #### Paths
        // Specify where your content directory lives
        paths: {
            contentPath: path.join(__dirname, '/content/')
        }
    }
};

module.exports = config;

I also tried to recreate the symlink by removing the old one and creating it again using

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/ghost /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ghost

I restarted the server using sudo service nginx restart and also ghost with sudo service ghost restart

When I checked it status of ghost with sudo service ghost status , it says it’s running.

The Nginx Logs can be found here

Any help would be much appreciated!

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Accepted Answer

Got it working again! Somehow the permissions had changed. (Realization after reading the Ghost log and doing some research) So running,

chown -R ghost:ghost /var/www/ghost

and then restarting the Ghost service got it to work again!

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