Nginx and a per server's user setting

Andrea Moro

3/27/23, 4:26 PM

On my local dev machine, I'd like to run an nginx server with several websites, each of them running with a different user that can be either used to run the process and/or at least used to impersonate the user with which files/folders are accessed.

My understanding is that the user setting is located in the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file and cannot be nested under the server block of the sites configuration.

Is there anything that can be done, without creating docker files or separate virtual machines?

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server

nginx

Score:1

Ubuntu

Thomas Ward

3/27/23, 5:49 PM

NGINX does not have per-server user runtimes. If you need that then you need individual independent NGINX instances running with different configs and different sites.

It can be done with stock NGINX (building example setups right now) but you need different listen ports and config roots and cannot use the same config files for each instance. It is probably easier to run each site in a specific docker container or LXD container or VM.

Even in this setup though with containers , non-root users cannot run NGINX on port 80 and many nginx instances cannot bind to 80 and 443 so you still need an NGINX or Apache or haproxy instance to hand off to the specific backends based on hostname.

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Thomas Ward

3/28/23, 1:25 AM

FYI I'm going to try and create some of these configs to share a solution, however the third COVID jab / vaccine is taking a toll on me today, so patience and i'[ll provide a config eventually.

Andrea Moro

3/28/23, 6:16 PM

Take you time and get yourself well. Thanks for the support

Andrea Moro

4/3/23, 12:11 PM

hope your jab was ok? When you have a time, I would love to read your input.

Thomas Ward

4/3/23, 8:55 PM

@AndreaMoro Jab + Work are taking my time, i'll need some more patience from you before I can provide any kind of working examples

Thomas Ward

4/6/23, 7:05 PM

@AndreaMoro I'm working on this right now to see if I can make this work, however I'm running into other concerns/issues with the testing - needless to say getting this to work 'properly' is nontrivial so if I run out of space here for my answer once I DO Have this working, I'll have to offload this to a larger blog post or such on my own site for how to do it. I haven't given up though, just work and holidays and stuff keeping me distracted/busy

Thomas Ward

4/6/23, 7:27 PM

@AndreaMoro so, there're some compiled defaults with nginx in the repos that break the ability to multiuser this. I have not tested with nginx upstream's versions of nginx but wil shortly; however if they have a precompiled default too then it'll be a problem. Standby.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Nginx and a per server's user setting

TH: Nginx และการตั้งค่าผู้ใช้ต่อเซิร์ฟเวอร์

RO: Nginx și o setare de utilizator pe server

RU: Nginx и настройка пользователя для каждого сервера

VI: Nginx và cài đặt người dùng của mỗi máy chủ

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