403 Forbidden Nginx: what is it and how to fix the situation?

And ordinary users, and webmasters oftenfaced with the problem of access to individual pages or even entire sites on the Internet. In this case, instead of the requested resource, a 403 Forbidden Nginx is issued in the web browser. What is this error and how to fix it, read on. In the article we will offer solutions for both ordinary users and site administrators.

What does 403 Forbidden Nginx mean?

Сама природа ошибки состоит в том, что при an attempt to call a page hosted on a site that runs on the Nginx web server cannot be accessed. The reasons for this can be quite a lot.

But the message itself is not literallyindicates an error. The fact is that 403 Forbidden Nginx is the normal status code of a resource. Most often, such a warning is issued on Ubuntu systems, but on Windows it can also be seen.

Causes of failure in users and webmasters

As for the reasons causing the appearance of such a status code, they can be divided into two types, which relate to groups of ordinary users and web administrators.

In the case of ordinary users are the following reasons:

• violations in the work of the Internet resource itself;
• entering an incorrect website address;
• blocking a resource (for example, according to Roskomnadzor directives);
• blocking the user or the IP of his computer due to violations of the rules of the site (ban);
• browser errors (cookies, cache, etc.).

For the admin group, the reasons for the 403 Forbidden Nginx warning appear somewhat differently:

• use of incorrect name or damaged index home page file;
• open a directory for which the Autoindex parameter is set to Off;
• lack of correct rights to the folder;
• wrong file path;
• DNS cache update error when changing hosting;
• a ban on viewing content in a .htaccess file or in a general server configuration.

In this situation, for both groups, you can use several unified solutions to correct the situation.

Error 403 Forbidden Nginx: how to fix the user?

If the failure is temporary, it is usually sufficient to simply restart the computer system. If this does not help, the following can be suggested as universal solutions:

• check the spelling of the address of the resource so that it does not have capital letters and symbols in Cyrillic;
• clear cookies and web browser caches;
• try using a different browser;
• make sure that you are not banned on the site;
• try using access with utilities to hide your external IP (Free Hide IP);
• contact the administration of the resource and check the problem of its performance;
• wait a while and try access again if the problem is in the functionality of the Internet resource.

Some fix tips for webmasters

To eliminate the 403 Forbidden Nginx failure, administrators will find the following tips useful:

• check the correctness of specifying the name of index files index.html, index.htm, index.php, index.shtml, etc., so that they do not contain capital letters or Cyrillic characters;
• set permissions on the folder 755, on files - 644;
• check the correctness of the specified paths to files and directories;
• pause for approximately 24 hours if the problem is that the DNS cache did not have time to update;
• add the line Options + Indexes to the .htaccess file;
• if the root directory has the name Home, rename the page according to the standards and in the .htaccess file list the DirectoryIndex home.php line.

Here, in principle, and all that concerns the mainthe reasons for the emergence of code 403 and methods of exit from this situation. As can be seen from the foregoing, there is nothing particularly catastrophic in such a failure (in particular, for ordinary users). But when eliminating the problem at any level, it is necessary to take into account all the factors that could be the root cause of the situation.

With users, everything is simple, but administrators in some cases will have to sweat.