Why is reverse proxy is not working with nginx?

I have spun up a Fedora box, and am running a golang server at port 8080. I am trying to setup nginx reverse proxy on that application so that I can access it through port 80.

If you want to skip reading the whole question, here’s the error:

2019/07/27 05:50:46 [crit] 4186#0: *1 connect() to 127.0.0.1:8080 failed (13: Permission denied) while connecting to upstream, client: <MY IP>, server: _, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:8080/", host: "<DROPLET IP>"

I have a really minimal golang app:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
)

func helloWorld(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello, you requested: %s\n", r.URL.Path)
}

func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/", helloWorld)
    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

At this point when I run go run main.go, I can go to port 8080 and see the response (it’s 200).

I have a default nginx.conf with following modifications.

server {
    listen      80;
    server_name _;  # I have tried changing this to my droplet IP as well
    root        /usr/share/nginx/html;

    location / {
        proxy_pass  http://127.0.0.1:8080;
    }

    # Followed by the default error handing
}

The response I’m getting back is 502 Bad Gateway.

What might be wrong?