Where to put html files for nginx to serve

Summary

nginx cannot access files in a user’s home directory by default. Create a link from /var/www/<website_name> to the location of your website files and update the nginx .conf file accordingly.

The Problem

I installed nginx to serve my website to localhost for development and testing. I repeatedly got a ‘403 forbidden’ message when I tried to view localhost on my browser. The log files confirmed that nginx could not access the index.html file which is required to display the website. I use Debian.

The solution

When I copied the website files to /var/www/example_website and updated the nginx conf file so that the root location was this folder, the site displayed. So I created a soft link from the /var/www directory to the folder containing my html files:

sudo ln -s /home/demo/sites/example.com/public_html /var/www/example_site

Edit the .conf file to reflect the new root location:

    root /var/www/example_site
    index index.php index.htm index.html;

Restart the nginx process:

    sudo systemctl restart nginx

Explanation

A little more searching on t’net found an obvious explanation. For security, nginx cannot serve files from your home directory. This is to prevent nefarious actors from using web-shenanigans to access files in this folder.