Unable to serve static content with nginx. Getting 403 forbidden error

Question

I have a node.js project, working with nginx acting as a reverse proxy. I'm trying the configure nginx to serve static content. Both nginx and node.js are docker containers. I've tried to use the following solutions:

1. How do you serve static files from an nginx server acting as a reverse proxy for a nodejs server?
2. Serving static files with NGINX

No matter what i do, I always get the following error:

directory index of "/usr/src/app/public/" is forbidden

Here is my nginx configuration:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name ~^(.+)$;
    root /usr/src/app/public;

    location / {
        try_files $uri @nodejs;
    }

    location @nodejs {
        default_type text/css;
        proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding  "";
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        set $key $http_host$request_uri;
        set_escape_uri $escaped_key $key;
        srcache_fetch GET /redis $key;
        srcache_store PUT /redis2 key=$escaped_key&exptime=120;
        add_header X-Cached $srcache_fetch_status;
        proxy_pass http://node;
    }

# Try fetching from Redis
    location = /redis {
       ...
    }
# Storing to Redis
    location = /redis2 {
       ...
    }

    include /etc/nginx/default.d/*.conf;
}

Here is my docker-compose:

services:
  web:
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:80:80"
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: docker/nginx/Dockerfile
    volumes:
      - ./docker/nginx/server.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/server.conf
      - ./docker/nginx/nginx.conf:/usr/local/openresty/nginx/conf/nginx.conf
    links:
      - node:node
  node:
    ports:
      - "81:80"
    environment:
      DEVELOP: "true"
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: ./docker/node/Dockerfile

As mentioned above, I get error of directory index of "/usr/src/app/public/" is forbidden.

Some more info:

• Nginx has the relevant permissions (Rnning with root)
• I'm able to get specific static files from the public directory. For example: /public/image.png
• When i create some index.html file in the public directory, I'm able to load it. However, The expected behaviour is that nginx will pass me to my backend server using proxy_pass http://node configuration, So it seems that the proxy_pass doesn't occurring.

What could be the issue? Please advise.

Update:

I've updated nginx configuration as suggested to:

try_files $uri @nodejs;

Initially, The issue seemed to be solved and i could load my backend server. However, I order to verify that now the static content is being served from the nginx container, I've deleted the public directory from nodejs container, and now i get the following error:

Failed to lookup view "index" in views directory "/usr/src/app/public"

Does anyone know what could be the issue?

Answer 1

Since your node container is set to expose via port 81 in the docker-compose file, your proxy_pass has to be updated like this.

proxy_pass http://node:81;

Refer to this article to setup nginx with a nodejs reverse proxy step by step https://medium.com/@francoisromain/setup-node-js-apache-nginx-reverse-proxy-with-docker-1f5a5cb3e71e