GitLab 403 error after disabling nginx

Question

I have an omnibus package installation of GitLab on my web server.

I disabled nginx in the gitlab.rb using nginx['enable'] = false because I wanted to create multiple servers reachable by multiple subdomains.

The problem now is whenever I call my GitLab in the browser, it gets a 403 forbidden error.

Since this is a permission error, I expected to maybe use the wrong user here, but I also added web_server['external_users'] = ['www-data'] in the gitlab.rb file and double checked nginx's config file – the user is called 'www-data' as usual.

Have a look at my full config file:

user www-data;
worker_processes auto;
pid /run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections 768;
    # multi_accept on;
}

http {

    ##
    # Basic Settings
    ##

    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    keepalive_timeout 65;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;
    # server_tokens off;

    server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
    # server_name_in_redirect off;

    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;

    ##
    # SSL Settings
    ##

    ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; # Dropping SSLv3, ref: POODLE
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;

    ##
    # Logging Settings
    ##

    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

    ##
    # Gzip Settings
    ##

    gzip on;
    gzip_disable "msie6";

    # gzip_vary on;
    # gzip_proxied any;
    # gzip_comp_level 6;
    # gzip_buffers 16 8k;
    # gzip_http_version 1.1;
    # gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

    ##
    # Virtual Host Configs
    ##

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

And here is my server configuration:

server {
        server_name gitlab.example.com;

        root /var/opt/gitlab;
        index index.html index.htm;

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
}

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

Note: Using an existing Passenger/Nginx installation does mention you need to disable the built-in Nginx and Unicorn:

# Disable the built-in unicorn
unicorn['enable'] = false

Make sure you run sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure for the changes to take effect.

Issue 692 also mentions:

I compiled nginx with passenger support.
I installed passenger : yum install passenger .
I add the server block to a vhost file as instructed.
But it's not working till I see how to proper install passenger onto nginx:

Refer to 2.3.3 of this page

Open /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and put passenger_root /path-to-locations.ini; under the http section

The real path is the output of passenger-config --root

Restart the nginx server and it should work (for me).

Warning:

I had different versions between my ruby and passenger_ruby after a fresh GitLab migration on a new server.
I had to change my ruby version and then install passenger again in order to correct this problem.