Nginx 403 Forbidden Even After Setting The Permission

Question

I want to get Letsencrpyt SSL for my domain. Part of the process is, the site needs to be authorized before getting the certificate.

I created the folder ./well-known and ran the command I was asked to and I got;

Nginx 403 forbidden.

I'm on nginx/1.10.0 (Ubuntu)

I chown the directory and granted it 755 yet still the same. Check out the permissions in my directory below.

namei -l /var/www/example.com/.well-known                      

 f: /var/www/example.com/.well-known
 drwxr-xr-x root   root /
 drwxr-xr-x root   root var
 drwxr-xr-x root   root www
 drwxr-xr-x cman sudo example.com
 drwxr-xr-x cman sudo .well-known

I also created a working.html file in the /.well-known folder and I load example.com/.well-known/working.html, I got the same 403 Forbidden.

Nginx.conf

 upstream kip_app_server {
   # fail_timeout=0 means we always retry an upstream even if it failed
   # to return a good HTTP response (in case the Gunicorn master nukes a
   # single worker for timing out).

    server unix:/var/www/example.com/src/run/trav.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
      listen 80;
      server_name example.com www.example.com;

 location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
 access_log /var/www/example.com/logs/access.log;
 error_log /var/www/example.com/logs/nerror.log;

 charset utf-8;

 client_max_body_size 75M;

  location /static/ {
       alias /var/www/example.com/src/static/;
   }

   location /media/ {
       alias var/www/example.com/src/media/;
  }

   location ~ /\.well-known {
       allow all;
       alias /var/www/example.com/.well-known/;
    }


    location / {
      include proxy_params;
       proxy_pass http://kip_app_server;
       #proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $server_name;
      #proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
   }
 }

Answer 1

Your code would work if you were not using an alias.

Try this:

location ^~ /.well-known {
   allow all;
   alias /var/www/example.com/.well-known/;
}

or this:

location ^~ /.well-known {
    allow all;
    auth_basic off;
    alias /path/to/.well-known/;
}

When aliasing, the ^ is required.

This is Nginx specific behaviour, to the way they perform matching. There is a detailed write-up here on matching logic and caveats, it is confusing: https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec/issues/221

Answer 2

I tried but could not figure this out. I believe certbot is not getting the correct location and is probably writing the challenge to some other location. I had a script watching the acme challenge directory and nothing was ever created there. Ended by using the webroot option.

certbot certonly -d example.com -a webroot

It prompts for the webroot location, but only for the 1st time - not for renewal, which allows for auto-renewal. It may work without the certonly option, but I did not try it. I updated the NGINX config manually with the cert location.