Nginx – Permission to write using ‘deploy’ user

capistranochefchef-solodeploymentnginx

I'm currently new to Chef and Capistrano. I'm using version 3.x of Capistrano to deploy Rails 4 application.

I have successfully bootstrapped a server using chef solo. One cookbook that I'm using is Nginx.

Back to my simple Rails 4 app, I'm trying to run this command to check the status of my deployment:

cap production deploy:check

However, it throws some error:

DEBUG [05e580a4] Command: /usr/bin/env mkdir -pv /var/www/shared /var/www/releases
DEBUG [05e580a4]    mkdir: cannot create directory `/var/www': Permission denied
DEBUG [05e580a4]    mkdir: cannot create directory `/var/www': Permission denied

I'm using deploy user for Capistrano, and on my Chef node config, I speficied the deploy user. I can also logged in on my instance using deploy user.

Is there a proper way for me to address the permissions on Chef or in Capistrano?

Best Answer

The directory you intend to deploy to should already exist and have the correct ownership and permissions before you try to run Capistrano to deploy to it. So you need to handle that beforehand, probably in the same chef recipe where you created the user.

Related Solutions

Chef bash resource not executing as specified user

The problem is (likely) not Chef running the command as the wrong user, but that the shell running your script is not a login shell. This means that some environment variables (like HOME) will not be set the way you expect, leading npm to try to write files in the wrong place.

The problem is discussed in issue CHEF-2288. While that remains outstanding, you could try adding HOME=/home/hubot-user in your code block, before npm is invoked.

Nginx – Chef-solo cannot locate an nginx recipe template

To fix you should probably add this to the beginning of your nginx default recipe:

directory "/etc/nginx/sites-available" do
    owner "root"
    group "root"
    mode "0755"
end

For what it's worth, I've been doing the same thing with Chef (Hosted), EC2 and Amazon Linux. It took me a while, but I figured out that it was almost always easier to just roll my own recipes. I now have a dozen that I now use, and I've removed all the Opscode shared ones I initially tried.

In fact, my default recipe for nginx has just one line:

`package "nginx"`

So one way to go is to install that on your server first with yum install nginx and then grab the default config file it created. Bring that back to your cookbook as a template, and put in ERB lines to customize any values for your needs.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Chef bash resource not executing as specified user

Nginx – Chef-solo cannot locate an nginx recipe template

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