proxy_pass isn't working when SELinux is enabled, why?

Question

I'm having an application listening on port 8081 and Nginx running on port 8080. The proxy pass statement looks like:

$ cat /var/etc/opt/lj/output/services/abc.servicemanager.conf

location /api/abc.servicemanager/1.0 { proxy_pass     http://localhost:8081;}

In nginx.conf, I include this file as:

include /etc/nginx/conf.d/services/*.conf;

The /etc/nginx/conf.d/service is a symlink:

# ll /etc/nginx/conf.d/

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root   39 Dec 10 00:19 services -> ../../../var/etc/opt/lj/output/services

This is a CentOS 7.0 SELinux Enabled system. If I setenforce 0, and make it Permissive, I don't see any issues. So the file is in right place and no issues with paths. If SELinux is enforcing, I see the following in audit log:

type=AVC msg=audit(1418348761.372:100930): avc:  denied  { getattr } for  pid=3936 comm="nginx" path="/var/etc/opt/lj/output/services/abc.servicemanager.conf" dev="xvda1" ino=11063393 scontext=system_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:object_r:var_t:s0 tclass=file

I want to know how to enable Nginx to find the conf file without having to disable SELinux.

Answer 1

Worth noting for beginners in SELinux that if your proxied service is running on 8080, you can use the command below without compiling a policy.

$ sudo setsebool httpd_can_network_connect 1 -P