My nginx config for a unicorn-hosted Rails app. Hitting unicorn directly serves the application; however, attempting to load it via nginx produces a “directory index of … is forbidden” error as shown below. If I put an index.html file in the applicaiton’s `public` directory, nginx serves it fine.

error.log

2013/05/23 08:12:15 [error] 19732#0: *1 directory index of "/var/www/leakcrawler/current/public/" is forbidden, client: 58.6.229.249, server: leakcrawler.example.com, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "leakcrawler.example.com"

leakcrawler.conf

upstream unicorn {
  server unix:/tmp/unicorn.leakcrawler.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
  listen 80 default deferred;
  server_name leakcrawler.example.com;
  root /var/www/leakcrawler/current/public;

  location / {
    gzip_static on;
  }

  location ^~ /assets/ {
    gzip_static on;
    expires max;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
  }

  try_files $uri/index.html $uri @unicorn;
  location @unicorn {
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_redirect off;
    proxy_pass http://unicorn;
  }

  error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
  client_max_body_size 4G;
  keepalive_timeout 10;
}

Success!!!

These lines were at fault:

  location / {
    gzip_static on;
  }

Removing them fixed the problem.