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Jules
Asked: 2016-11-17 15:46:04 +0800 CST

Why does nginx raise a 404 when it tries to acess static files on a FreeBSD server?

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I've got nginx 1.8.1 on a server running FreeBSD 10.2. I'm trying to serve files from a subdirectory of /usr/local/www/ (which is default on FreeBSD), but for some reason, requests to the files I'm trying to access always result in a 404.

The file specifically is /usr/local/www/example.com/pubic_html/index.html, with /usr/local/www recursively owned by www:www, the user and group of the nginx worker process, with permissions recusrively set to 755.

My server block, in /usr/local/etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com:

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

    root /usr/local/www/example.com/public_html;

    location /app {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }

    location / {
        try_files $uri =404;
    }
}

I'm honestly puzzled by this. I haven't had this issue on Linux with Nginx or Apache, and I haven't had this issue working with Apache on FreeBSD before, either. How can I get nginx to serve this static file?

EDIT: while requests for static files don't result in anything being logged to my nginx-error.log, it does result in normal 404 hit records in the nginx-access.log.

freebsd nginx static-files

2 Answers

  1. OK here's the thing: the default configurations for web servers in FreeBSD DO NOT use files inside the sites-available directory. Either you have to put the contents of the files inside /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf or add this line to /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf so that it will read files inside the sites-available directory:

    # virtual hosting
include /usr/local/etc/nginx/sites-available/*.conf;

    The same behavior also applies to Apache on FreeBSD. (Probably on other web servers as well, but I have experience only with these two.)

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  2. Do you have other configuration files for Nginx?
    I guess you have listen <ip> directive somewhere else so you should also use listen <ip> default_server or listen <ip>:80 default_server in your example.com configuration.

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