nginx serving 404 pages - php

Question

EDIT: Based on #Devons advice I ran the following commands with no errors (found in this post):
$ sudo find /var/public/www -type d -exec chmod 755 {} +
$ sudo find /var/public/www -type f -exec chmod 644 {} +
But when I list the files inside www the permissions still look wrong. What am I doing wrong? Thanks!
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 4096 Aug 28 12:45 app
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 1646 Aug 28 12:45 artisan
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 0 Aug 28 12:45 bootstrap
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 1201 Aug 28 12:45 composer.json
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 105046 Aug 28 12:55 composer.lock
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 4096 Aug 28 12:45 config
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 0 Aug 28 12:45 database
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 503 Aug 28 12:45 gulpfile.js
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 159 Aug 28 12:45 package.json
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 87 Aug 28 12:45 phpspec.yml
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 899 Aug 28 12:45 phpunit.xml
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 0 Aug 28 12:45 public
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 1928 Aug 28 12:45 readme.md
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 0 Aug 28 12:45 resources
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 567 Aug 28 12:45 server.php
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 0 Aug 28 12:45 storage
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 0 Aug 28 12:45 tests
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 4096 Aug 28 12:56 vendor
This is my first time with nginx and cannot get laravel welcome page to show. I am using ubuntu 14.04 and VBox 5.
I have my server configured in /var/nginx/sites-enabled/default as
server {
listen 80 default_server;
charset utf-8;
server_name doimain.app www.domain.app;
root /var/www/public;
index index.php index.html;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri /index.php =404;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}
Inside /var/www/public I can list the laravel public folder files
$ ls -l /var/www/public
total 3
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 0 Aug 28 12:45 favicon.ico
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 1786 Aug 28 12:45 index.php
-rwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 24 Aug 28 12:45 robots.txt
But I get 404 when I go to domain.app. The nginx error log shows:
2015/08/28 14:29:35 [crit] 1487#0: *14 stat() "/var/www/public/index.php" failed (13: Permission denied), client: 10.0.0.18, server: domain.app, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "domain.app"
I have tried without success the following:
Ensure www-data owns the folder structure /var/www
$ sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www
Changed access rights to /var/www
$ sudo chmod -R 0755 /var/www
Thanks!

Answer 1

The public directory is owned by root and is not readable to others. You either need to change the ownership to www-data or chmod all of the folder and files. The folder should be 0755 and files be 0644 for most configurations. You can leave it how you have it if the files are owned by the same user running nginx and php (I assume www-data).
Changing the ownership of /var/www by itself does nothing, you have to change all the folders and files in the web directory.
You can chmod and chown recursively with the -R flag.
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/public

Answer 2

Solved it by addig www-data user to vboxsf group and restarting the server.
$sudo usermod -G vboxsf -a www-data