nginx proxy server localhost permission denied

Question

I am just setting up nginx as a webserver that proxies directly to a tomcat app server. When the user connects to my website Nginx should redirect the request to port 8080 where the tomcat app server is running.

I am doing everything on amazon ec2 instance that is running Redhat 7.

What I have so far is this:

nginx.conf file

user nginx;
worker_processes  1;

server {
 listen 80;
 server_name mydomainname;
 access_log  /var/log/nginx/example.log;
 error_log /var/log/nginx/example.error.log;

 location / {
  proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/example/;
 }
}

The error that I am getting is (13: Permission denied) while connecting to upstream, client

This is definitely a user access issue, but cannot seem to figure it out. It seems like nginx does not have access to redirect to port 8080.

Also, nginx is running under myuser

root     15736   nginx: master process   /usr/sbin/nginx
myuser  15996   nginx: worker process
root     16017   grep --color=auto nginx

I have tried to put 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost, but no luck. I have also tried to change the user in the nginx.conf to myuser, still no luck. When I connect directly to the application sever I have no issues.

Example URL of my tomcat http://mydomain:8080/example/

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

I was able to find a solution after 2 days of searching. Somehow SELinux was not permitting Nginx to proxy to my server. Running the command below fixed the issue.

 /usr/sbin/setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect true 

Adding the -P flag thanks to @DaveTrux