404 when Serving Static Files Owned By Another User From /opt

OS = Debian 11

I have edited default nginx (version 1.18.0, installed from Debian repository) config as below:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;

    root /var/www/html;

    index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

    server_name _;

    location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    location /torrent/ {
            autoindex on;
            alias /opt/docker/qbittorrent/downloads;
    }
}

to serve my downloaded files with qbittorent docker container on HTTP protocol. However, I get a 404 Not Found error when I visit either /torrent/ or /torrent/some_folder/some_name.some_extension.

If important, these have rw-r--r-- permission and are owned by docker_qbit:docker though the web server is installed by a sudoer.

What is happening is that the NGINX user doesn't have permission to traverse the directory you have specified in your alias.

Your requirements indicate we cannot change the permissions on the target directory.

The only solution I see would be to add the main nginx (www-data) user to the docker group. That way the webserver should be able to access the specified directory without changing its permission.

If the default nginx user on Debian 11 is www-data.

Assuming that to be the case, the command to do this would look like this:

usermod -a -G docker www-data

That command will modify the user "www-data" by adding them to group "docker".

To be sure what user is running nginx you could look at the output of this command:

ps -eo user,comm | grep nginx

Once complete you can reload nginx and see if the content is now available.

systemctl reload nginx