mjhjmtu

I installed mainline nginx 1.13.9 using the provided rpm on CentOS 7.4. I had to use this rpm because I am forced to do yum localinstall due to company governance.

My problem is that systemctl start nginx always yields this:

Job for nginx.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status nginx.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

journalctl tells me:

Mar 07 08:57:05 myhost nginx[19466]: nginx: [emerg] open() "/var/opt/nginx/config/nginx.conf" failed (13: Permission denied)

(What you see here is another company thing: I mustn't put the conf files under etc, I have to keep them in a directory where I don't need root permissions to change them)

These are the permissions set for the nginx.conf:

-rw-r--r--. 1 nginx nginx 241 Mar 7 09:17 nginx.conf

I reduced the nginx.conf to an (I guess) absolute minimum and even tried to put log files, pid and alike to directories where permissions are granted for sure. The error log contains absolutely nothing.

This is my reduced nginx.conf:

user nginx nginx;
pid /tmp/nginx.pid;
error_log /tmp/error.log debug;

events 


http 
 default_type application/octet-stream;
 charset UTF-8;

 server 
 listen 8080;
 location / 
 root /tmp/;
 
 

And this is my slightly modified nginx.service definition:

[Unit]
Description=nginx - high performance web server
Documentation=http://nginx.org/en/docs/
After=network-online.target remote-fs.target nss-lookup.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=forking
PIDFile=/var/run/nginx.pid
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/nginx -c /var/opt/nginx/config/nginx.conf -g "error_log /tmp/error.log debug;"
ExecReload=/bin/kill -s HUP $MAINPID
ExecStop=/bin/kill -s TERM $MAINPID

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

(You can see that I tried to force an error_log just in case nginx fails before the nginx.conf is read)

When I do sudo -u nginx /usr/sbin/nginx -c /var/opt/nginx/config/nginx.conf -g "error_log /tmp/error.log debug;" this works just fine. Despite of a short warning the process starts up fine:

nginx: [warn] the "user" directive makes sense only if the master process runs with super-user privileges, ignored in /var/opt/nginx/config/nginx.conf:1

I am sure it must be some stupid mistake, but I have no clue which.

This problem was caused by two mistakes I made:

• incorrect directory permissions


• a missing group membership

One of the directories was missing the x, so the process couldn't traverse the path. I had to chmod g+X it.
In addition to that I had to add the technical user of nginx (which in my scenario is not the default nginx) to the nginx group.