Trouble with nginx and serving from multiple directories under the same domain

Question

I have nginx setup to serve from /usr/share/nginx/html, and it does this fine. I also want to add it to serve from /home/user/public_html/map on the same domain. So:

my.domain.com would get you the files in /usr/share/nginx/html
my.domain.com/map would get you the files in /home/user/public_html/map

With the below configuration (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf) it appears to be going to my.domain.com/map/map as noticed by this:

2011/03/12 09:50:26 [error] 2626#0: *254 "/home/user/public_html/map/map/index.html" is forbidden (13: Permission denied), client: <edited ip address>, server: _, request: "GET /map/ HTTP/1.1", host: "<edited>"

I've tried a few things but I'm still not able to get it to cooperate, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

#######################################################################
#
# This is the main Nginx configuration file.  
#
#######################################################################

#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Main Module - directives that cover basic functionality
#----------------------------------------------------------------------

user              nginx;
worker_processes  1;

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

pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;


#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Events Module 
#----------------------------------------------------------------------

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# HTTP Core Module
#----------------------------------------------------------------------

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

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;
    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;    

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  _;
        #access_log  logs/host.access.log  main;

        location / {
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }

        location /map {
            root   /home/user/public_html/map;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }

        error_page  404              /404.html;
        location = /404.html {
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        }

        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        }
    }
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}

Answer 1

The root directive is the problem here. Quote from the doc:

note: Keep in mind that the root will still append the directory to the request so that a request for "/i/top.gif" will not look in "/spool/w3/top.gif" like might happen in an Apache-like alias configuration where the location match itself is dropped. Use the alias directive to achieve the Apache-like functionality.

Basically, only use root for real roots: if the content is to be at / use root. If it's going to end on a subfolder, use alias:

location  /map/ {
  alias  /home/user/public_html/map/;
}

Also check what user nginx is running as and make sure that this user can access /home/user/public_html/map