Question

We are setting up a nginx web server to allow /suburi access in our rails 3.1 app (such as access URL: http://www.railapp.com/subdomain). The subrui name here is byop. Our rails document root subdir is at /var/www/. The suburi byop is at /var/www/byop. Here is what we did after successful rails deployment:

1. Setup the nginx.conf:

   server {
   listen 80;
   server_name 154.248.209.181;
   root /var/www/;
   passenger_enabled on;
   rails_env production;
   passenger_base_uri /byop;
   }

2. Create symbolic link under /var/www as following:

   ln -s /var/www/byop/current/public /var/www/byop

nginx was stop and restarted. However 403 Forbidden page shows up for http://154.248.209.181/byop

We checked the symbolic link under /var/www and there is no link listed (only the byop subdir). Here is the output of ls -li:

ubuntu@ip-10-152-95-60:/var/www$ ls -li
total 4
9296 drwxrwsr-x 4 ubuntu www-data 4096 May  6 03:12 byop

What’s wrong with our setup above? Thanks so much.

Answer 1

The problem we found is with the step 2 to create the symlink. The name of the subdir and the name of symbolic link are the same. After using different symlink name, the problem solved. Here is the working copy:

1. Setup the nginx.conf:

server { 
    listen 80; 
    server_name 154.248.209.181; 
    root /var/www/; 
    passenger_enabled on; 
    rails_env production; 
    passenger_base_uri /by; 
 }

2. Create symlink under /var/www as following:

ln -s /var/www/byop/current/public /var/www/by

Then http://154.248.209.181/by brings up the page.