403 forbidden - Nginx - using correct credentials

Even though this question has its accepted answer, I still want to put another case that I have trouble with here so other people wouldn't need to struggle like me.

I got 403 with correct credentials too, the index file is not the case, the file existence is not the case neither and the config was this:

auth_basic "some message";
auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;

The problem here is that /etc/nginx/.htpasswd is an absolute path which actually points inside the same directory with nginx.conf. It somehow confused nginx to lookup the file. (By saying somehow, I don't fully understand how nginx couldn't just handle this because it's quite obvious that the path is absolute and nginx should just read it, so if anyone has a better explanation, please share by comments).

If I change it to:

auth_basic_user_file .htpasswd;

It worked because nginx expected to find that file in the same directory with nginx.conf.

Even if I change it to:

auth_basic_user_file /home/user/.htpasswd; #and move the file to /home/user too

It worked also because I think that the path didn't confuse nginx.

The error is not the authentication, but the directory your are trying to access and its content:

/home/deployer/sites/domain.com/control/memcache/

When the webserver processes the request it checks for known index files like index.html, index.php and so on. If it does not find one of these, it interprets the request as an attempt to list all files in the given directory. This seems to be forbidden in your nginx configuration ( which is good ). Message:

directory index of [...] is forbidden

Therefore I guess the directory

/home/deployer/sites/domain.com/control/memcache/

is empty or does not contain an index file that nginx recognizes.
If you request a specific file or create an index.html file, the 403-Error should be gone.

I got here because I had a similar problem. I had set up the top level directory to be "autoindex on;". I added password protection for a subdirectory with a separate declaration for ("/subdirectory") without repeating "autoindex on;" This left nginx looking for an index file, and since there was none, I saw "forbidden".

Once I added "autoindex on;" to the setup for "/subdirectory". the directory listing appeared when browsing the subdirectory.

This can be caused by permissions or a non-existent or invalid directory index directive.

Permissions: If www is owned by nginx but /var is owned by root, then www will inherit the permissions of var, thus denying access.

Index Directive: If the directory index is set to an unavailable file, then nginx will throw a 403. In this case, I'm guessing it's defaulting to index.htm instead of index.php.

Best of luckerage!