Question

nginx 403 forbidden ...

Posted January 11, 2014 268.6k views
I used this article https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-up-nginx-virtual-hosts-server-blocks-on-ubuntu-12-04-lts--3 to setup virtual hosts on nginx but I'm getting a 403 forbidden error. The article tells us to do this to set permissions `You can replace the "www-data" below with the appropriate username. sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com/public_html Additionally, it is important to make sure that everyone is able to read our new files. sudo chmod 755 /var/www` I therefore did this with my username sudo chown -R username:username /var/www/example.com/public_html but I'm still getting the 403 forbidden errror. Do you know anything I can try?
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m73mitchell
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12 answers
kamaln7 January 12, 2014
Do you have a file called index.html in /var/www/mydomain.com/public_html?
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Soban Vuex January 11, 2014
Hi,

The username used in the chown command should be the ones which nginx runs with - you can check that by running the command:
ps -ef | grep nginx (You are looking at the first column on any of the nginx worker processes

Once you chown with the good username you also need to restart nginx:
/etc/init.d/nginx restart
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m73mitchell January 11, 2014
Thanks, this was the output of ps -ef | grep nginx

root 14130 1 0 16:06 ? 00:00:00 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx
www-data 14132 14130 0 16:06 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
www-data 14133 14130 0 16:06 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
www-data 14134 14130 0 16:06 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
www-data 14135 14130 0 16:06 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
michael 14900 14326 0 17:35 pts/2 00:00:00 grep --color=auto nginx


Therefore, was I correct to do this?
sudo chown -R username:username /var/www/example.com/public_html

This is what the tutorial says this

`You can replace the "www-data" below with the appropriate username.
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com/public_html

right now I'm signed in as `michael` can I fix this problem
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Soban Vuex January 11, 2014
chown with www-data:www-data and restart nginx - that should fix the 403 error
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kamaln7 March 9, 2014
@doper408: Simply replace index.html with your own index.html that you want to use and you should be fine. If it's a PHP app, replace index.html with your own index.php file and make sure the index directive is set to index.php index.html (e.g.: index index.php index.html;) in your nginx's virtual host config.
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m73mitchell January 11, 2014
I did this but I'm still getting the error

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/mydomain.com/public_html

sudo service nginx restart
* Restarting nginx nginx
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doper408 March 9, 2014
@Kamal Nasser, I'm Having the same problem. If i keep the index.html file when i go to the domain I see this "Success: You Have Set Up a Virtual Host" if I remove it I get the "403 forbidden error" any solution to this. thanks in advance
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doper408 March 9, 2014
@Kamal Nasser , thanks a lot that work great, but only for the main page when a visit a page for example, domain.com/example I get "500 Internal Server Error" any suggestion to fix this. thanks in advance
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  • fadli June 10, 2015

    This is the step that I’ve done and it’s work:

    sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /usr/share/nginx/html/*
sudo chmod -R 0755 /usr/share/nginx/html/*

    This step is done on Ubuntu 14.04

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felixbaquerosa July 1, 2018

I Need Help To Download A MemoryHackers Download Sector Because I Can Not Download Because A 403 Forbidden nginx

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goran1301 January 29, 2019

Everything could be okay with your permissions. In my case, I got the same just because of wrong config. For example no or wrong php settings, no index.php as a root file or even wrong root folder.

Also your problem could be caused “sudo chmod 755 /var/www”, because it doesn’t contain -R flag. That’s important too.

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silvio463adab8a56f36792c90 February 23, 2019

Hello
I have resized a droplets and it gives me the following error:
403 Forbidden
nginx / 1.14.0 (Ubuntu)

is on Ubuntu server 18
I have performed the procedures in this post and the problem persists.
Can you help me with this?

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dariozadro May 19, 2020

If your file structure is outside the default location, you might need to add the “username” to the “www-data” group. Replace username with the appropriate one for your environment.

usermod -aG username www-data
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