Deploy Gatsby js static site on Nginx VPS

Question

Basically i built my gatsby site with gatsby build command and i want to serve the public directory with all the static files with Nginx.

I have my site in /var/www/mywebsite and also some test html basic page in /var/www/test. I can serve that test page and it works fine but when i change the directory to that gatsby site it doesn't work and i get Forbiden 403 error. I assume it might be my configuration but again, do i have to do something special with gatsby to serve all those static files properly?

nginx.conf

http {
    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;

    sendfile            on;
    tcp_nopush          on;
    tcp_nodelay         on;
    keepalive_timeout   65;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;

    index               index.html index.htm;
    include             /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type        application/octet-stream;

    # Load modular configuration files from the /etc/nginx/conf.d directory.
    # See http://nginx.org/en/docs/ngx_core_module.html#include
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;

    server {
        listen       80 default_server;
        listen       [::]:80 default_server;
        server_name  _;
        root         /usr/share/nginx/html;

        # Load configuration files for the default server block.
        include /etc/nginx/default.d/*.conf;

        location / {
        }

        error_page 404 /404.html;
            location = /40x.html {
        }

        error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
            location = /50x.html {
        }
    }

    server {
        server_name mywebsite.com www.mywebsite.com; # managed by Certbot
        # root /var/www/test;   # <-- This gets served
        root /var/www/mywebsite/public;  # <-- This doesn't
        index index.html index.html;

        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
        }

        error_page 404 /404.html;
            location = /40x.html {
        }

        error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
            location = /50x.html {
        }

        # some ssl certificates...
    }

    server {
        if ($host = www.mywebsite.com) {
            return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
        } # managed by Certbot
        if ($host = mywebsite.com) {
            return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
        } # managed by Certbot

        listen       80;
        listen       [::]:80;
        server_name mywebsite.com www.mywebsite.com;
        return 404; # managed by Certbot
    }
}

I read that i don't need sites-available and sites-enabled directories and that it can be configured here in the main nginx.conf file or included from that conf.d directory in the nginx.conf itself.

Answer 1

Forbidden error could be related to a permission problem.
You can check the permission by running ls -al in /var/www.

Run sudo chown www-data -R /var/www and see if the problem still occurs. If this doesn't fix the problem run:

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

And check the logs to get an idea what's the problem. or Inlcude the logs in your question.