I installed nginx as root, now I can't get permissions right to run as another user

August 10, 2016 36.5k views
Nginx Ubuntu
jamesfacts
By:
jamesfacts

As the title says, I have a server where nginx was originally installed by the root user. I now want to run nginx as a non-root user, a new user that I added to both the sudo the www-data groups.

When I try to run nginx from this new user, I get the following message:

nginx: [alert] could not open error log file: open() "/var/log/nginx/error.log" failed (13: Permission denied)
2016/08/09 22:07:52 [warn] 17609#0: the "user" directive makes sense only if the master process runs with super-user privileges, ignored in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:1
2016/08/09 22:07:52 [emerg] 17609#0: open() "/var/log/nginx/access.log" failed (13: Permission denied)

I’m confused why this is an issue—I changed the owner and group of /var/log/nginx/ to www-data. The nginx master process user is root, which I believe is correct, and the sub-processes are running (or trying to run) as www-data. The file permissions for error.log and ‘access.log` are 755. What am I missing?

2 comments
  • kamaln7 MOD August 10, 2016

    Hi! Can you post the output of the following command?

    sudo ls -lah /var/log/nginx
  • jamesfacts August 10, 2016

    Thanks for the suggestion. Here’s what I see after running that command:

    drwxrw-rw- 2 www-data www-data 4.0K Aug 8 12:15 .
    drwxrwxr-x 11 root syslog 4.0K Aug 10 06:31 ..
    -rwxrw-rw- 1 www-data www-data 7.6K Aug 10 12:55 access.log
    -rwxrw-rw- 1 www-data www-data 3.9K Aug 9 22:01 error.log

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6 Answers
jamesfacts August 15, 2016
Accepted Answer

I received some advice that solved my problem and seems to be sound counsel. I’m now starting the server from the non-root account using sudo and all is well. One little trick!

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  • naomeenche January 27, 2018

    What did you do to solve this issue? I have the same problem.
    marcelo@ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-nyc3-01:~$ nginx -t
    nginx: [alert] could not open error log file: open() “/var/log/nginx/error.log” failed (13: Permission denied)
    2018/01/27 17:58:44 [warn] 2078#2078: the “user” directive makes sense only if the master process runs with super-user privileges, ignored in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:2

MDS August 10, 2016

Try setting the permissions for /var/log/nginx/ to 766.

sudo chmod -R 766 /var/log/nginx/

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jamesfacts August 10, 2016

Thanks for the suggestion! I tried it out with no luck. I can’t even cd into the /var/log/nginx/ directory without sudo, an issue I’ve never had before. Permissions are definitely set to 766, though:

drwxrw-rw- 2 www-data www-data 4096 Aug 8 12:15 nginx

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jamesfacts August 15, 2016

Quick bump

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ssobhee November 30, 2017

Another bump

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maxolasersquad April 20, 2018

I ran into this exact problem, which had me stumped for a while. The problem is that nginx needs to execute as root and let the user directive in the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf handle running everything as the correct user. For me, I had the sytemd job defining the user to run nginx as.

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