.well-known/acme-challenge nginx 404 error

Question

I'm trying to verify a file upload for SSL certificate. The file needs to be .well-known/acme-challenge/file

I have successfully placed the file as above, but while accessing the same file from the web http://weburl.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/file, 404 error is coming up. When I place the same file in .well-known/ the file can be access from the path http://weburl.com/.well-known/file successfully.

My nginx configuration:

server {
        listen 80;

        server_name weburl.com; 
        root /var/www/html;

        location ~ /.well-known {
                allow all;
        }

        location ~ /\.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
            allow all;
            root /var/www/html;
            try_files $uri =404;
            break;
        }
}

Answer 1

You have to grant permissions for www-data user.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .well-known 

Answer 2

In the first case it looks for /var/www/html/.well-known/file.

In the second case it looks for /var/www/html/file.

What you intend is for it to find /var/www/html/.well-known/acme-challenge/file

This is because you specify root in the location block, which changes where it reads the file from.

So instead of this:

    location ~ /\.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
        allow all;
        root /var/www/html; # <================= Your problem, sir
        try_files $uri =404;
        break;
    }

You should have this:

    location ~ /\.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
        allow all;
        try_files $uri =404;
        break;
    }

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