(13: Permission denied) while connecting to upstream:[nginx]

Question

I am working with configuring Django project with Nginx and Gunicorn.

While I am accessing my port gunicorn mysite.wsgi:application --bind=127.0.0.1:8001 in Nginx server, I am getting the following error in my error log file;

2014/05/30 11:59:42 [crit] 4075#0: *6 connect() to 127.0.0.1:8001 failed (13: Permission denied) while connecting to upstream, client: 127.0.0.1, server: localhost, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:8001/", host: "localhost:8080"

Below is the content of my nginx.conf file;

server {
    listen 8080;
    server_name localhost;
    access_log  /var/log/nginx/example.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/example.error.log;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8001;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    }
}

In the HTML page I am getting 502 Bad Gateway.

What mistake am I doing?

Answer 1

Disclaimer

Make sure there are no security implications for your use-case before running this.

Answer

I had a similar issue getting Fedora 20, Nginx, Node.js, and Ghost (blog) to work. It turns out my issue was due to SELinux.

This should solve the problem:

setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

Details

I checked for errors in the SELinux logs:

sudo cat /var/log/audit/audit.log | grep nginx | grep denied

And found that running the following commands fixed my issue:

sudo cat /var/log/audit/audit.log | grep nginx | grep denied | audit2allow -M mynginx
sudo semodule -i mynginx.pp

Option #2 (probably more secure)

setsebool -P httpd_can_network_relay 1

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/152358/difference-between-selinux-booleans-httpd-can-network-relay-and-httpd-can-net

References

http://blog.frag-gustav.de/2013/07/21/nginx-selinux-me-mad/
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/SELinux/Tutorials/Where_to_find_SELinux_permission_denial_details
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/SELinux/Tutorials/Managing_network_port_labels

Answer 2

I’ve run into this problem too. Another solution is to toggle the SELinux boolean value for httpd network connect to on (Nginx uses the httpd label).

setsebool httpd_can_network_connect on

To make the change persist use the -P flag.

setsebool httpd_can_network_connect on -P

You can see a list of all available SELinux booleans for httpd using

getsebool -a | grep httpd

Answer 3

I have solved my problem by running my Nginx as the user I'm currently logged in with, mulagala.

By default the user as nginx is defined at the very top section of the nginx.conf file as seen below;

user nginx; # Default Nginx user

Change nginx to the name of your current user - here, mulagala.

user mulagala; # Custom Nginx user (as username of the current logged in user)

However, this may not address the actual problem and may actually have casual side effect(s).

For an effective solution, please refer to Joseph Barbere's solution.