Permission denied because search permissions are missing on a component of the path, after chmod and chgrp
Finally figured out a fix. I ran these 2 functions to recursively file the folder and file permissions of www and within.
find /var/www -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find /var/www -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
I read this page here: https://wiki.apache.org/httpd/13PermissionDenied and it basically explained and reminded me that permissions are inherited, "do the same for the directory and each parent directory." So I ran those 2 and everything is working again.
Usually the execute permission for one path is not set, like it was in this question. The easiest way to solve this is the following command:
chmod a+rX -R /var/www
But on using CentOS7 or RHEL7 you might encounter problems with SELinux. If file permission are right and you still get the error, look at the following log:
tail -f /var/log/audit/audit.log
If you get a message like this:
type=AVC msg=audit(1464350432.916:8222): avc: denied { getattr } for pid=17526 comm="httpd" path="/var/www/app/index.html" dev="sda1" ino=42021595 scontext=system_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0 tcontext=unconfined_u:object_r:var_t:s0 tclass=file
type=SYSCALL msg=audit(1464350432.916:8222): arch=c000003e syscall=4 success=no exit=-13 a0=7fde4e450d40 a1=7ffd05e79640 a2=7ffd05e79640 a3=7fde42e43792 items=0 ppid=17524 pid=17526 auid=4294967295 uid=48 gid=48 euid=48 suid=48 fsuid=48 egid=48 sgid=48 fsgid=48 tty=(none) ses=4294967295 comm="httpd" exe="/usr/sbin/httpd" subj=system_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0 key=(null)
This means: SELinux blocks the access to your document root. You can try a command like this (Recursive and verbose on option -Rv):
chcon --user system_u --type httpd_sys_content_t -Rv /var/www/app/public
To find the right settings, look into a working directory like /var/www/html with this:
ls -laZ /var/www/
It should look like:
drwxr-xr-x. server server system_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t:s0 .
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:var_t:s0 ..
drwxr-xr-x. server server system_u:object_r:httpd_sys_script_exec_t:s0 cgi-bin
drwxr-xr-x. server server system_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t:s0 html
drwxrwxr-x. server server unconfined_u:object_r:var_t:s0 app