Nginx: stat() failed (13: permission denied)

Question

Nginx operates within the directory, so if you can't cd to that directory from the nginx user then it will fail (as does the stat command in your log). Make sure the www-user can cd all the way to the /username/test/static. You can confirm that the stat will fail or succeed by running

sudo -u www-data stat /username/test/static

In your case probably the /username directory is the issue here. Usually www-data does not have permissions to cd to other users home directories.

The best solution in that case would be to add www-data to username group:

gpasswd -a www-data username

and make sure that username group can enter all directories along the path:

chmod g+x /username && chmod g+x /username/test && chmod g+x /username/test/static

For your changes to work, restart nginx

nginx -s reload

Nginx need to have +x access on all directories leading to the site's root directory.

Ensure you have +x on all of the directories in the path leading to the site's root. For example, if the site root is /home/username/siteroot:

chmod +x /home/
chmod +x /home/username
chmod +x /home/username/siteroot

I've just had the same problem on a CentOS 7 box.

Seems I'd hit selinux. Putting selinux into permissive mode (setenforce permissive) has worked round the problem for now. I'll try and get back with a proper fix.

On CentOS 7.0 I had this Access Deined problem caused by SELinux and these steps resolved the issue:

yum install -y policycoreutils-devel
grep nginx /var/log/audit/audit.log | audit2allow -M nginx
semodule -i nginx.pp

Update: Just a side-note from what I've learned while using digitalocean's virtual Linux servers, or as they call them Droplets. Using SELinux requires a decent amount of RAM. It's most probably like you won't be able to run and manage SELinux on a droplet with less than 2GB of RAM.