Vagrant user doesn't seem to natively have sudo/root permissions

Question

I'm trying to determine if there's a bug in Vagrant or in nginx.

I have the following Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "hashicorp/precise32"
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "10.0.1.7"
  config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 8080, host: 9005
end

So I run vagrant up && vagrant ssh and the server provisions and spins up. I want to manually install nginx on my new VM, so (per the instructions for installing nginx on Ubuntu 14.04) I then run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx

nginx installs. I run mkdir ~/mysite and then I change its /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file to:

worker_processes  1;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    server {
        listen       8080;
        server_name  localhost;

        location / {
            root   /home/vagrant/mysite;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }

        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }
    }
    include servers/*;
}

And then I run nginx -s reload. The error I receive is:

vagrant@precise32:~$ nginx -s reload
nginx: [alert] could not open error log file: open() "/var/log/nginx/error.log" failed (13: Permission denied)
2016/12/22 00:36:48 [notice] 1442#0: signal process started
2016/12/22 00:36:48 [alert] 1442#0: kill(890, 1) failed (1: Operation not permitted)

My understanding is that vagrant should be a user on the VM with sudo access and root permissions. No? Can anyone reproduce this and figure out why I'm unable to reload nginx with my custom nginx.conf file?

Answer 1

vagrant user has indeed sudo privilegies but its not because it has this right that he can run command as root. As you did run sudo apt-get update with sudo, you need to run nginx with sudo :

$ sudo nginx -s reload