Running Nginx as non root user

Question

I installed Nginx using Ansible. To install on Centos7 I used the yum package so it by default was run as root user. I want it to start and run as a different user

Answer 1

Just in case it helps someone stumbling over this question in 2020, here is my minimal nginx.conf for running a web server on port 8088, works for a non-root user. No modding of file permissions necessary! (Tested on Centos 7.4 with nginx 1.16.1)

    error_log /tmp/error.log;
    pid       /tmp/nginx.pid;
    
    events {
      # No special events for this simple setup
    }
    http {
      server {
        listen       8088;
        server_name  localhost;
    
        # Set a number of log, temp and cache file options that will otherwise
        # default to restricted locations accessible only to root.
        access_log /tmp/nginx_host.access.log;
        client_body_temp_path /tmp/client_body;
        fastcgi_temp_path /tmp/fastcgi_temp;
        proxy_temp_path /tmp/proxy_temp;
        scgi_temp_path /tmp/scgi_temp;
        uwsgi_temp_path /tmp/uwsgi_temp;
    
        # Serve local files
        location / {
          root /home//web;
          index  index.html index.htm;
          try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
        }
      }
    }