Changing the user that nginx worker processes run under (Ubuntu 12.04)

Question

I have a manual install of nginx on Ubuntu 12.04. When I ran ./configure I used the following options:

./configure --user=www-data --group=www-data --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_realip_module

Now the nginx worker processes run under the www-data user in the www-data group. However, I wish to change this to a different user (called nginx in my case).

Is this possible to do after running make and make install already?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

As long as your new user (nginx in your case) has the proper rights, everything should work.

You have to change your user setting in nginx.conf

...
user nginx;
...

and restart/reload your server. Link to docs.

Answer 2

If you use PHP5-FPM and get a 502 error after restart nginx, take a look on /var/run/php5-fpm.sock (Debian) :

root@ns353941:/var/run# chown nginx:www php5-fpm.sock

In my case :

nginx = new nginx user

www = group for web

nginx user belong to www, obviously.