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How to resolve Digitalocean 403 forbidden nginx error?

Nginx 403 Forbidden error is a status code generated and displayed to the user when a client tries to access a part of the webserver with insufficient permissions.

Today, let us see the steps followed by our Support techs to resolve it:

• Check if nginx is running:

systemctl status nginx

If nginx is running you should see something like this:

nginx.service - The nginx HTTP Server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-11-19 09:37:46 UTC; 2 days ago
     Docs: https://httpd.nginx.org/docs/2.4/

If nginx is not running then the output would look like this:

nginx.service - The nginx HTTP Server Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: inactive (dead) since Fri 2019-11-22 08:41:01 UTC; 39s ago Docs: https://httpd.nginx.org/docs/2.4/

• If nginx is not running you could start it with:

systemctl start nginx

Then check the status agian and make sure that nginx remains running.

• If nginx did not start after a reboot, you could enable it so that it starts after the next reboot:

systemctl enable nginx

• Check your nginx config syntax:

nginx -t

If you get an error, you would need to fix that problem and then you could restart nginx:

systemctl restart nginx

• If you get Syntax OK when running nginx -t then your confiruation is correct, so I would recommend checking your error logs:

tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log

• Check the permissions of the files and folders in your document root:

Find the user that your nginx service is running as:

ps auxf | grep nginx

If you are using Ubuntu, the user should be www-data, so you would need to make sure that your files and folders are owned by that user, so nginx could read and write to those files:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/yourdomain.com

• Then, check if nginx is binding to the default ports:

netstat -plant | grep '80\|443'

• Finally, check if ufw allows TCP connections on port 80 and 443:

ufw status

Other serverside issues:

1: Incorrect Index File
2: Incorrectly set permissions 

Client-Side Cause of Error 403

As mention, at other times, the 403 error may user-caused instead of being on the server-side. To resolve such issues on the client-side, perform the following operations.

    - Ensure you are accessing the correct web location
    - Clear browser cache
    - Ensure the firewall or proxy allows you to access the web resource.

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Conclusion

To sum up, our skilled Support Engineers at Bobcares demonstrated steps to resolve Digitalocean 403 forbidden nginx error