The Prince Academy株式会社 | Common Issues and Troubleshooting | Serving Static Content: Your First Website | Mastering Nginx: A Beginner's Guide to High-Performance Web Servers

As you delve into serving your first static website with Nginx, you're bound to encounter a few hiccups. Don't worry, these are common and usually straightforward to resolve. This section will guide you through the most frequent issues and how to troubleshoot them effectively.

'403 Forbidden' Error: This is one of the most common errors. It means Nginx found the file but doesn't have permission to read it, or the directory doesn't have the correct permissions for Nginx to access. This often happens when you've just copied files or changed ownership.

# Check file and directory permissions
ls -l /path/to/your/web/root

Ensure the Nginx user (often 'www-data' on Debian/Ubuntu or 'nginx' on CentOS/RHEL) has read permissions on your files and execute permissions on your directories. You might need to use chmod and chown.

# Example: Grant read for owner and group, execute for directories
chmod -R 755 /path/to/your/web/root
# Example: Change ownership to Nginx user (replace www-data if needed)
chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/web/root

'404 Not Found' Error: This signifies that Nginx couldn't locate the requested file. Double-check the root directive in your Nginx configuration and ensure it points to the correct directory where your website files are stored. Also, verify that the filename requested by the browser exactly matches the filename on your server (case sensitivity matters!).

http {
    server {
        listen 80;
        server_name example.com;
        root /var/www/html; # Make sure this path is correct
        index index.html index.htm;

        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
    }
}

Nginx Not Starting or Reloading: If Nginx fails to start or reload after configuration changes, it's usually due to a syntax error in your nginx.conf or any included configuration files. Always test your configuration before applying it.

# Example: Grant read for owner and group, execute for directories chmod -R 755 /path/to/your/web/root # Example: Change ownership to Nginx user (replace www-data if needed) chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/web/root

http { server { listen 80; server_name example.com; root /var/www/html; # Make sure this path is correct index index.html index.htm; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ =404; } } }