Nginx is throwing an 403 Forbidden on Static Files

Question

I have a django app, python 2.7 with gunicorn and nginx.

Nginx is throwing a 403 Forbidden Error, if I try to view anything in my static fo

Answer 1

MacOs El Capitan: At the top of nginx.conf write user username group_name

My user name is Kamil so i write:

user Kamil staff;

(word 'staff' is very important in macOS). This do the trick. After that you don't need to change any permission in your project folder and files.

Answer 2

It seems the web server user doesn't have read permissions to the static files. You can solve this in 2 ways:

1. (easiest, safer) run the nginx as you app user instead of default nginx user. To do this, add the following in nginx.conf

   user your_app_user
   

   Replace your_app_user with appropriate unix username for your app. In this case the your_app_user already has necessary permissions to the static content.

2. Another way would be to to grant permissions for the web server user to the static dir.

Answer 3

After hours upon hours following so many articles, I ran across : http://nicholasorr.com/blog/2008/07/22/nginx-engine-x-what-a-pain-in-the-bum/

which had a comment to chmod the whole django app dir, so I did:

sudo chmod -R myapp

This fixed it. Unbelievable!

Thanks to those who offered solutions to fix this.

Answer 4

Try specifying a user at the top of your nginx.conf, above the server section.

user www-data;

Answer 5

The minimum fix that worked for me is:

sudo chmod -R 664 /home/ubuntu/virtualenv/myapp/myapp/homelaunch/static/
sudo chmod -R a+X /home/ubuntu/virtualenv/myapp/myapp/homelaunch/static/

(BTW, in my case the static folder is called collected_static)

Answer 6

It appears the user nginx is running as (nginx?) is missing privileges to read the local file /home/ubuntu/virtualenv/myapp/myapp/homelaunch/static/img/templated/home/img.png. You probably wanna check file permissions as well as permissions on the directories in the hierarchy.