How to Solve nginx "13: Permission denied" on RHEL8

Takahiro Iwasa

Aug 28, 2021

2 min read

nginx

When routing traffic to port 1080 using nginx on an EC2 RHEL8 instance, I encountered an error message saying 13: Permission denied. This issue is related to SELinux.

I added the following lines to nginx.conf file. The example below uses nginx.conf file directly for simple description.

diff -U3 nginx.conf.old nginx.conf

--- nginx.conf.old      2021-08-27 23:04:42.527667800 +0900
+++ nginx.conf  2021-08-28 01:20:38.088408400 +0900
@@ -45,6 +45,12 @@
         include /etc/nginx/default.d/*.conf;

         location / {
+            proxy_set_header Host                   $host;
+            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP              $remote_addr;
+            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host       $host;
+            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server     $host;
+            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For        $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
+            proxy_pass http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:1080;
         }

         error_page 404 /404.html;

Then, I encountered the following error.

systemd[1]: Starting The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server...
nginx[1626]: nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx[1626]: nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:1080 failed (13: Permission denied)
nginx[1626]: nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test failed
systemd[1]: nginx.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=1
systemd[1]: nginx.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
systemd[1]: Failed to start The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server.

I was able to solve the issue with the following command.

sudo semanage port -a -t http_port_t -p tcp 1080

If you see sudo: semanage: command not found, install it with the following command.

sudo dnf provides /usr/sbin/semanage
sudo dnf install policycoreutils-python-utils