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I've trouble to get aliases working correctly on nginx. When i try to access the aliases, /pma and /mba (see secure.example.com.conf), i get a 403 Forbidden but the base url works correctly.

I read a lot of posts but nothing helped, so here i am.

Nginx and php-fpm are running as www-data:www-data and the permissions for the directories are set to:

drwxrwsr-x+  5 www-data www-data 4.0K Dec  5 22:48 ./
drwxr-xr-x.  3 root     root     4.0K Dec  4 22:50 ../
drwxrwsr-x+  2 www-data www-data 4.0K Dec  5 13:10 mda.example.com/
drwxrwsr-x+ 11 www-data www-data 4.0K Dec  5 10:34 pma.example.com/
drwxrwsr-x+  3 www-data www-data 4.0K Dec  5 11:49 www.example.com/
lrwxrwxrwx.  1 www-data www-data   18 Dec  5 09:56 secure.example.com -> www.example.com/

Im sorry for the bulk, but i thought better too much than too little.

Here are the configuration files:


user              www-data www-data;
worker_processes  1;

error_log   /var/log/nginx/error.log;
#error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log  notice;
#error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log  info;

pid         /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;

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

                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;

    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;

    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;



server {
    listen          80;
    server_name     secure.example.com;
    return          301 https://$host$request_uri;

server {
    listen          443;
    server_name     secure.example.com;

    access_log      /var/log/nginx/secure.example.com.access.log;
    error_log       /var/log/nginx/secure.example.com.error.log;

    root            /srv/http/secure.example.com;

    include         /etc/nginx/ssl/secure.example.com.conf;
    include         /etc/nginx/conf.d/index.conf;
    include         /etc/nginx/conf.d/php-ssl.conf;

    autoindex       off;

    location /pma/ {
        alias       /srv/http/pma.example.com;

    location /mda/ {
        alias       /srv/http/mda.example.com;


ssl                 on;
ssl_certificate     /etc/nginx/ssl/secure.example.com.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/secure.example.com.key;
ssl_protocols       SSLv3 TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_ciphers         HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;


index   index.php index.html index.htm;


location ~ \.php$ {
    try_files       $uri =404;
    fastcgi_index   index.php;
    fastcgi_param   HTTPS on;
    fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME  $request_filename;
    include         fastcgi_params;


2013/12/05 22:49:04 [error] 29291#0: *2 directory index of "/srv/http/pma.example.com" is forbidden, client:, server: secure.example.com, request: "GET /pma/ HTTP/1.1", host: "secure.example.com"

EDIT: forgot to mention, i'm running CentOS 6.4 x86_64 and nginx 1.0.15

Thanks in advance!

share|improve this question

1 Answer 1

You have your /pma and /mda in a non standard location (for CentOS) in /srv/http the problems you're seeing could be related to SELinux.

A quick test is to configure SELinux for permissive mode

setenforce 0

Test to see if your pages work correctly. If they do then you need to configure the correct context for /srv/http

semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_content_t "/srv/httpd(/.*)?"
restorecon -rv /srv/http
setenforce 1

Test again and hopefully you're good to go.

share|improve this answer
Thank you for answering! I set SELiunx to permissive and after that didn't work i also disabled it, but I still get the 403. The error log says nginx tries directory listing and that is the reason why i get the 403 but nginx shouldn't even try because i set the index to index.php index.html. I also tried to set the index again in the location section of /pma and /mda but it's also being ignored. Furthermore i tried adding index.php to the end of the URL (/pma/index.php) and then i got a 404. –  michell90 Dec 6 '13 at 13:31
@michell90: Have you checked the permissions of the files in /srv/http and of the /srv and /srv/httpd directories to ensure that nginx can read the files and read/execute the directories at some level ? –  Iain Dec 6 '13 at 13:40
@lain Yes, the permissions shown at the top of my post are set recursively with chmod and chown. I changed my configuration again and deleted the "/" at the end of the alias, now it looks like: location /pma. Now it processes index.html correctly, but when it comes to an php file i still get the 404. So now the problem seems to be my php-fpm. But i don't understand why nginx behave like this, also i'm pretty sure i already tried this and earlier it didn't work. I'm a bit confused right now. Btw: I get the same behavior at my worksation where i run ArchLinux. –  michell90 Dec 6 '13 at 14:43

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