This looks like an nginx configuration issue, not a permission problem.
If /xxxxx is the project directory, the web root of the project should be /xxxxx/web.
You log shows that you are trying to list the content of you project directory,
when you should only ever be accessing /xxxxx/web/app_dev.php, /xxxxx/web/app.php or /xxxxx/web/config.php,
so this 403 error is the expected behaviour.
When trying to access the dev environment, your URL should be something like
http://localhost/xxxxx/web/app_dev.php,
or http://xxxxx.local/app_dev.php if you have a web host configured correctly.
The symfony doc has an example of nginx configuration for 2.8:
https://symfony.com/doc/2.8/setup/web_server_configuration.html#nginx
I changed it a bit to fit your case:
server {
server_name xxxxx.local;
root /var/www/html/xxxxx/web;
location / {
# try to serve file directly, fallback to app.php
try_files $uri /app.php$is_args$args;
}
# DEV
# This rule should only be placed on your development environment
# In production, don't include this and don't deploy app_dev.php or config.php
location ~ ^/(app_dev|config)\.php(/|$) {
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.1-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
include fastcgi_params;
# When you are using symlinks to link the document root to the
# current version of your application, you should pass the real
# application path instead of the path to the symlink to PHP
# FPM.
# Otherwise, PHP's OPcache may not properly detect changes to
# your PHP files (see https://github.com/zendtech/ZendOptimizerPlus/issues/126
# for more information).
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $realpath_root;
}
# PROD
location ~ ^/app\.php(/|$) {
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.1-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
include fastcgi_params;
# When you are using symlinks to link the document root to the
# current version of your application, you should pass the real
# application path instead of the path to the symlink to PHP
# FPM.
# Otherwise, PHP's OPcache may not properly detect changes to
# your PHP files (see https://github.com/zendtech/ZendOptimizerPlus/issues/126
# for more information).
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $realpath_root;
# Prevents URIs that include the front controller. This will 404:
# http://domain.tld/app.php/some-path
# Remove the internal directive to allow URIs like this
internal;
}
# return 404 for all other php files not matching the front controller
# this prevents access to other php files you don't want to be accessible.
location ~ \.php$ {
return 404;
}
error_log /var/log/nginx/xxxxx_error.log;
access_log /var/log/nginx/xxxxx_access.log;
}
This goes into your nginx configuration file, for example:
/etc/nginx/conf.d/xxxxx.conf
Then you need to add the hostname xxxxx.local to your /etc/hosts file:
127.0.0.1 xxxxx.local
