On a Digital Ocean droplet running Ubuntu 21.10 impish I am deploying a bare bones Rails 7.0.0.alpha2 application to production. I am setting up nginx as the reverse proxy server to communicate with Puma acting as the Rails server.
I wish to run puma as a service using systemctl without sudo root privileges. To this effect I have a puma service setup in the users home folder located at ~/.config/systemd/user, the service is enabled and runs as I would expect it to run.
systemctl status --user puma_master_cms_production
reports the following
● puma_master_cms_production.service - Puma HTTP Server for master_cms (production)
Loaded: loaded (/home/comtechmaster/.config/systemd/user/puma_master_cms_production.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Thu 2021-11-18 22:31:02 UTC; 1h 18min ago
Main PID: 1577 (ruby)
Tasks: 10 (limit: 2338)
Memory: 125.1M
CPU: 2.873s
CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/[email protected]/app.slice/puma_master_cms_production.service
└─1577 puma 5.5.2 (unix:///home/comtechmaster/apps/master_cms/shared/tmp/sockets/puma_master_cms_production.sock)
Nov 18 22:31:02 master-cms systemd[749]: Started Puma HTTP Server for master_cms (production).
The rails production.log is empty. The puma error log shows the following
cat log/puma_error.log
=== puma startup: 2021-11-18 22:31:05 +0000 ===
The pid files exist in the application roots shared/tmp/pids folder
ls tmp/pids
puma.pid puma.state
and the socket that nginx needs but is unable to connect to due to permission denied exists
ls -l ~/apps/master_cms/shared/tmp/sockets/
total 0
srwxrwxrwx 1 comtechmaster comtechmaster 0 Nov 18 22:31 puma_master_cms_production.sock
nginx is up and running and providing a
502 bad gateway
response. The nginx error log reports the following error
2021/11/18 23:18:43 [crit] 1500#1500: *25 connect() to unix:/home/comtechmaster/apps/master_cms/shared/tmp/sockets/puma_master_cms_production.sock failed (13: Permission denied) while connecting to upstream, client: 86.160.191.54, server: 159.65.50.229, request: "GET / HTTP/2.0", upstream: "http://unix:/home/comtechmaster/apps/master_cms/shared/tmp/sockets/puma_master_cms_production.sock:/500.html"
sudo nginx -t reports the following
sudo nginx -t
nginx: [warn] could not build optimal proxy_headers_hash, you should increase either proxy_headers_hash_max_size: 512 or proxy_headers_hash_bucket_size: 64; ignoring proxy_headers_hash_bucket_size
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successfu
just to be pedantic both an ls and a sudo ls to the path reported in the error shows
ls /home/comtechmaster/apps/master_cms/shared/tmp/sockets/
puma_master_cms_production.sock
as expected so I am stumped to understand why nginx running as root using sudo service nginx start is being denied access to a socket that exists, that is owned by the local user rather than root.
I expect the solution is going to be something totally obvious but I can not see what
This problem ended up being related to the folder permissions for the users home folder and specifically a change in the way Ububntu 20.10 sets permissions differently to previous versions of ubuntu, or at least a difference in the way the DigitalOcean setup scripts behave.
This was resolved with a simple command line chmod o=rx from the /home against the user folder concerned e.g.
cd /home
chmod o=rx the_home_folder_for_user