PHP FPM gives permission denied?

Solution 1:

I had set the /var/lib/nginx/tmp to ec2-user/ec2-user (i even +777 everything to check)

But ... I also had to set /var/lib/nginx to ec2-user/ec2-user

... after also chown/chgrp the parent nginx folder : no more errors.

Took me some hours...

This generally happens. When the user setting in nginx.conf is changed from

user nginx;

to something else. In this case,

user ec2-user ec2-user;

The chmod command is not necessary per Chris's comment, and could open up a security hole.

Solution:

Check the current user and group ownership on /var/lib/nginx.

$ ls -ld /var/lib/nginx
drwx------ 3 nginx nginx 4096 Aug  5 00:05 /var/lib/nginx

This tells you that a possibly non-existant user and group named nginx owns this folder. This prevents file uploading.

Change the folder ownership to the user defined in nginx.conf in this case ec2-user (sudo may not be required).

$ sudo chown -Rf ec2-user:ec2-user /var/lib/nginx

Verify that it actually changed.

$ ls -ld /var/lib/nginx
drwx------ 3 ec2-user ec2-user 4096 Aug  5 00:05 /var/lib/nginx

The permission denied error should now go away. Check the error.log (based on nginx.conf error_log location).

$ sudo nano /opt/nginx/error.log

If that doesn't work you might need to reload nginx and php-fpm.

$ sudo service nginx reload
$ sudo service php-fpm reload