Access denied (403) for PHP files with Nginx + PHP-FPM

Question

I have been spending few hours on that issue and despite the high number of posts related to it, I cannot solve it. I have a Fedora 20 box with Nginx + PHP-FPM that worked quite good until today (after I reloaded php-fpm.service I guess). Nginx is serving static files with no problem, but any PHP file triggers an error 403.

The permissions are ok, nginx and php-fpm are running under the user "nginx":

root     13763  0.0  0.6 490428 24924 ?        Ss   15:47   0:00 php-fpm: master process (/etc/php-fpm.conf)
nginx    13764  0.0  0.1 490428  7296 ?        S    15:47   0:00 php-fpm: pool www
nginx    13765  0.0  0.1 490428  7296 ?        S    15:47   0:00 php-fpm: pool www
nginx    13766  0.0  0.1 490428  7296 ?        S    15:47   0:00 php-fpm: pool www
nginx    13767  0.0  0.1 490428  7296 ?        S    15:47   0:00 php-fpm: pool www
nginx    13768  0.0  0.1 490428  6848 ?        S    15:47   0:00 php-fpm: pool www

The served files have been set to nginx user as well, I even ended chmoding 777 those files to try, but still "Access denied" for any PHP files.

Below is a server of my Nginx config:

server {
        listen          80;
        server_name     localhost;

        root            /var/www/html;

         location ~ \.php$ {
            fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
            try_files $uri =404;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }
}

The PHP-FPM pool:

[www]
...
listen = 127.0.0.1:9000
user = nginx
group = nginx
...

For the versions:

php-5.5.11 (as well as php-fpm-5.5.11 of course)

nginx-1.4.7

I am adding the Nginx error log:

 FastCGI sent in stderr: "Access to the script '/var/www/html' has been denied (see security.limit_extensions)" while reading response header from upstream, client: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, server: localhost, request: "GET /index.php HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"

And precise that security.limit_extensions is correct, set to: security.limit_extensions = .php.

About the path permissions, /var/www/html can be traversed. What am I missing?

Answer 1

Here are some possible solutions:

1. In your php-fpm www.conf set security.limit_extensions to .php or .php5 or whatever suits your environment. For some users, completely removing all values or setting it to FALSE was the only way to get it working.

2. In your nginx config file set fastcgi_pass to your socket address (e.g. unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;) instead of your server address and port.

3. Check your SCRIPT_FILENAME fastcgi param and set it according to the location of your files.

4. In your nginx config file include fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; in the location block where all the other fastcgi params are defined.

5. In your php.ini set cgi.fix_pathinfo to 1