Passenger complains about Apache permissions despite 777

apache-2.4permissionsphusion-passengerredmine

I installed Redmine on Fedora 18. The installation works when tested with webrick, as explained in the official HowTo.

Now I want to use Passenger and Apache to host Redmine. What I get is:

Passenger error #2
An error occurred while trying to access '/var/www/redmine/config/environment.rb': Cannot stat '/var/www/redmine/config/environment.rb': Permission denied (errno=13)

Apache doesn't have read permissions to that file. Please fix the relevant file permissions.

After several unsuccessful tries to resolve the problem, I gave the ownership of the whole /var/www/redmine directory including contents to the apache user and changed the permissions recursively to 777. I su'd to the apache user and could open and stat the environment.rb file without any problem. So I think that it is not a permission problem after all, but faced with this explicit error message, I am out of ideas.

What could be the problem here, and any ideas how to fix it (preferably a solution which allows me to change the permissions back to a sensible value)?

footnotes:

  • This is possibly related to this question.
  • I didn't forget to restart apache after changing the permissions.
  • I am running httpd version 2.4.4-2.fc18, Phusion Passenger version 4.0.4 Redmine version 2.3.1.

Best Answer

I had forgotten that Fedora has SELinux enabled by default. Turning off SELinux removed the error.

As pointed out by dawud, turning off SELinux should not be considered a solution - rather, SELinux should be configured to permit Apache to use the files.

The quick solution was to run restorecon on the directory in question. This sets the security context to the type expected of the parent directory. My files being in a subdirectory of /var/www, they were set to httpd_sys_content_t, and Apache was allowed to access them. If they had been somewhere else, I would have had to change the type manually.

After solving the SELinux issue, the file permissions can be chmoded back to the usual level without further problems.

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