Question

How to access Nginx error logs?

I had a particularly outdated ubuntu distribution (12.10) and was beginning the process to update sequentially to 16.04. Yesterday, I successfully updated from 12.10->13.10->14.04 using the Ubuntu old releases archive and this tutorial from Digital Ocean. I didn’t have to change the kernel, because our droplet was using grubloader v2.0.

Excited at the success of updating, I used do-release-upgrade to move from 14.04 to 16.04 and, while the distribution was updated successfully, I immediately ran into 502 errors (nginx /1.4.6) after updating. I am new to all of this, so I did the release upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04 in the exact same way as the 13.10->14.04 upgrade.

When I try to access the nginx error logs, I get a “Permission denied” reading. First question: How do I access the error logs? Second question (dependent on what the error logs might or might not show): has anyone run into this problem when updating from 14.04->16.04? Also, I restored my droplet back to 12.10 and updated back to 14.04 and I am now running into the same 502 errors, despite the 14.04 update working fine previously.

Here is the “Permission denied” code:

Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-143-generic i686)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/
New release '16.04.4 LTS' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.

Last login: Wed Mar 21 12:34:48 2018 from c-73-205-79-49.hsd1.fl.comcast.net
root@foss:~# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS
Release:        14.04
Codename:       trusty
root@foss:~# /var/log/nginx/error.log
-bash: /var/log/nginx/error.log: Permission denied
root@foss:~#
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Jason Peters • March 21, 2018
Accepted Answer

root@foss:~# /var/log/nginx/error.log

should be something more like

root@foss:~# cat /var/log/nginx/error.log

Bobby Iliev • November 7, 2020

Hi there,

Just came across this question in 2020. Here are some suggestions for anyone who might need this:

Here is a link to an answer on how to troubleshoot common Nginx problems:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-to-troubleshoot-common-nginx-issues-on-linux-server

And here is also a quick video demo on how to do that as well:

Regards, Bobby

Casulleres • May 22, 2018

I have the same problem but still with no success, when I type cat /var/log/nginx/error.log I get cat: /var/log/nginx/error.log: Permission denied
I think the problem is the user of the folder, is not root, is www-data :

rails@mydroplet:/var/log$ ls -la

shows

drwxr-x---  2 www-data  adm           4096 mai 21 06:39 nginx

what is this user? how can I solve, I can not access with sudo (root user)

thanks