[SOLVED] open() "/root/project/static/*.css" failed (13: Permission denied) nginx

Issue

I have gotta my project setup with uwsgi, django, nginx Everything seems to be working fine but somehow I keep on getting the error on getting static files I have been reading through online and tried all the possible ways but I keep on getting this permission denied error on my static folder.

Can someone please let me know what I have done wrong with the permission and how I should change it?

this is my /var/log/nginx/error.log

open() "/root/project/static/*.css" failed (13: Permission denied), client: 2xx.xx.xx.xxx, server: _, request: "GET /static/*.css HTTP/1.1", host: "1xx.xx.xx.xxx"

This is my nginx site-available config

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

    # root /var/www/html;

    # Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
    # index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

    server_name _;

    #location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    #location /media  {
    #       root /root/project/mediafiles;
    #}


        location ^~ /static/ {
        allow all;  # this is from one of the posts but no luck
        auth_basic off;  # this is from one of the posts but no luck
            root /root/project;
        }


        location / {
            include         uwsgi_params;
            uwsgi_pass      unix:/tmp/uwsgi/project.sock;
        }

}

as my folder permission

for project folder it's drwxr-xr-x 23 www-data www-data

for static folder it's drwxr-x--- 8 www-data www-data 4096 May 23 14:40 static

I never made the permission to static 755 too but no luck. Anyways, this is using root as user instead of having an extra user and root is also in group of www-data

Thanks in advance for all the help.

EDIT:

As suggested this is the output of ps aux | grep nginx

root       810  0.0  0.0 124972  1440 ?        Ss   02:18   0:00 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on;
www-data   811  0.0  0.0 125688  4840 ?        S    02:18   0:00 nginx: worker process
www-data   812  0.0  0.0 125348  3196 ?        S    02:18   0:00 nginx: worker process
root      1159  0.0  0.0  14224  1004 pts/0    S+   04:25   0:00 grep --color=auto nginx

Solution

The problem I am guessing is the fact that your project root directory is at /root. The default permissions for /root are:

drwx------ 14 root root 4096 May 8 12:47 root

As you can see, other users, such as www-data don't even have read access to the /root directory. In Linux FS, if you need to read something at a path/a/b/c, you need to have read access to each of the folders in that path.

The Nginx worker process runs as user www-data which is trying to open a file that is rooted at /root where this user does not have read permissions, and therefore raising a Permission denied (13).

See this demo for more detail:

$ cat /root/test2/text.txt     
cat: /root/test2/text.txt: Permission denied
$ sudo cat /root/test2/test.txt  
A
$ sudo ls -la /root/ | grep test2
drwxrwxrwx   2 root     root       4096 May 24 02:04 test2

Hope this makes sense. The solution would be on of the following:

• Run nginx workers as root (not recommended)
• Move your project directory to a location that is designed to be accessed by multiple users such as /usr/local/share or /var/www/ (recommended)

Answered By - rtindru

Answer Checked By - Timothy Miller (WPSolving Admin)