Nginx – phptheadmin forbidden in Nginx although permited

configurationnginxpermissionsPHPphpmyadmin

I fail to understand why entrance to PHPmyadmin is forbidden (http://my_ip/phpmyadmin). Here's what I did to install it:

On a pure Ubuntu 16.04 machine (server, xenial) I've installed LEMP with php-fpm 7.0. Nginx conf is default:

apt-get update -y
apt-get upgrade nginx mysql-server php-fpm php-mysql -y

I then installed PMA and permitted it:

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get upgrade phpmyadmin php-mbstring php-mcrypt -y
ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ /var/www/html/
chown -R www-data:www-data /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ /var/www/html
chmod -R a-x,a=rX,u+w /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ /var/www/html

I really fail to understand what's wrong from the error log:

directory index of "/var/www/html/phpmyadmin/" is forbidden

What might cause PMA to be forbidden?

Update – general:

Update for Jenny:

I removed the symlink and added this conf inside the http block in nginx.conf and restarted the server, but no change is seen:

server {    
    location /phpmyadmin {
        index index.php index.html index.htm;
        root /usr/share;
    }
}

Best Answer

When you symlink a directory, you are telling nginx that "when you need to use /var/www/html/phpmyadmin, you should instead look at /usr/share/phpmyadmin/. And that directory is not under your webroot directory, so nginx won't be using it.

Instead of using a symlink, tell nginx to start using that directory directly. Example: 

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

That will tell nginx that the location /phpmyadmin lives under /usr/share instead of under /var/www/html/.

Or, if the /usr/ and the /var/ file systems are on the same partition, you could do a hard link instead of a symlink. But that's likely to cause problems for you if you ever change the partition layout.

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