Nginx Virtual host 403 Forbidden

Question

I have just brought a domain name (example.com) and have setup a URL frame redirection to my server's IP XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX, however I am getting a 403 forbidden error. I can access pages fine via the server IP. What I want is to copy the behavior of the server IP using my domain so I attempted to copy the virtual host for my IP but it doesnt work.

Here are my virtual host files:

server { 
    listen 80; 
    server_name example.com
    ;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/website.access_log;
            error_log /var/log/nginx/website.error_log;

            root /var/www;
            index index.html;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index   index.php;
        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/phpMyAdmin;
        include         fastcgi_params;
    }
}

And my current one for accessing the server by the IP directly (works):

server { 
    listen 80; 
    server_name xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
    ;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/website.access_log;
            error_log /var/log/nginx/website.error_log;

            root /var/www;
            index index.php;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index   index.php;
        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/phpMyAdmin;
        include         fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Here is my nginx.conf:

user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
pid /run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections 768;
    # multi_accept on;
}

http {

    ##
    # Basic Settings
    ##

    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    keepalive_timeout 65;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;
    # server_tokens off;

    # server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
    # server_name_in_redirect off;

    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;

    autoindex off;


    ##
    # Logging Settings
    ##

    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

    ##
    # Gzip Settings
    ##

    gzip on;
    gzip_disable "msie6";

    # gzip_vary on;
    # gzip_proxied any;
    # gzip_comp_level 6;
    # gzip_buffers 16 8k;
    # gzip_http_version 1.1;
    # gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml                             application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

    ##
    # nginx-naxsi config
    ##
    # Uncomment it if you installed nginx-naxsi
    ##

    #include /etc/nginx/naxsi_core.rules;

    ##
    # Virtual Host Configs
    ##

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/phpMyAdmin;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com;


}

I have also tried:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Been on this one for a while now.

Thanks!

EDIT ------

The problem was with my domain registrar, I had my domain setup as "URL forwarding", when it should have been "A record". This fixed it for me. Good luck all!

What do you see in the web server log files when this happens? — Paul Haldane, Dec 06 '14 at 12:55
By the looks of it no error is written to either error.log or website.error.log. Interestingly, if I set `autoindex on;` I am redirected to the root folder (from whatever path I try to access). Here is what the access log looks like: `[06/Dec/2014:08:55:44 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 339 "http://example.com/android_connect/OSM_PHP/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.62 Safari/537.36 OPR/26.0.1656.20 (Edition beta)"` — Gmeister4, Dec 06 '14 at 14:00
I may just not be seeing it, but it seems like you're missing `server_name example.com;` in your config, so it's not matching your domain. — Nathan C, Dec 06 '14 at 22:04
If you solved this yourself, please [post an answer and accept it](https://serverfault.com/help/self-answer). "Answers" do not belong in edits to the question; they will be missed there. — Michael Hampton, Apr 18 '18 at 21:37

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 08 '14 at 17:50

I almost have same your problem but I solve it with this configuration If you have only one site on your server then you have to delete default configuration file . rm /etc/nginx/sites-available/default only leave /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com with this configuration

server { 
    listen 80; 
    server_name example.com;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/website.access_log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/website.error_log;
            root /var/www;
            index index.php  index.html;

    location / {
          try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
               }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index   index.php;
        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/phpMyAdmin;
        include         fastcgi_params;
    }
}

if you want site acceptable via IP too you should create default configuration file

edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default And use same configuration you used first

server { 
    listen 80; 
    server_name xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;
    root /var/www;
    index index.php  index.html;
    location / {
          try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
               }
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index   index.php;
        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/phpMyAdmin;
        include         fastcgi_params;
    }
 }

Last you can move your site example.com file to /var/www/example.com and delete default configuration file then restart nginx

Nginx Virtual host 403 Forbidden

1 Answers1