Install SSL cert error

Troubleshooting
1

I am running nginx on a rpi 4. Once installed I can connect to the default http web page. I then edited the default and modified the virtual host entries to include my server.crt and server.key location. I then ran nginx -t with the following errors below. If I change to root and run nginx -t no errors.

2025/02/26 09:54:09 [warn] 24827#24827: the “user” directive makes sense only if the master process runs with super-user privileges, ignored in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:1

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok

2025/02/26 09:54:09 [emerg] 24827#24827: open() “/run/nginx.pid” failed (13: Permission denied)

nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test failed

1 Like
2

I am not an expert. (There are a bunch of smarter people here). However, it sems that nginx is unable to open the /run/nginx.pid file due to a permission denied error.

Check the permissions of the `/run/nginx.pid, maybe chmod 644 /run/nginx.pid

Maybe change the user directive in the nginx configuration file: you can change the user directive in the nginx configuration file (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf ) :
user your_user your_user_group;

more details about your nginx configuration and the specific permissions set on the relevant files and directories could be helpful if this doesn’t work

1 Like
3

thanks for your feed back. I am pasting a few file snippets

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

user www-data;
worker_processes auto;
pid /run/nginx.pid;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
include /etc/nginx/modules-enabled/*.conf;

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf owner root permissions rw-r–r–
/run/nginx/pid has root for owner and group
I tried 644 and 755 no success

/var/www/html
drwxr-xr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Feb 27 16:28 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Feb 27 16:15 …
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 403 Feb 27 16:28 index.html
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 615 Feb 27 16:15 index.nginx-debian.html
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 79408 Apr 2 2014 Raspi-PGB001.png

let me know if you have any other thoughts

4

You will need to run the nginx process with root privileges, as it is required in order to bind to port 80/443. This is a standard linux behavior where only the root user is able to bind to ports 1-1023. It is standard to run NGINX as root, but it is possible to run in a un-privileged manner, you would just need to use a higher port number. You can see more details on how to run in this manner in our unprivileged docker image repo: