Ran into this issue briefly when moving a blog over to a Centos 7.2 cloud box.

File not found.

Nginx was running as user ‘nginx’, and that user had full ownership of all web files. Logically, everything should have run fine with 700 permissions, but it wasn’t.

cat /etc/passwd

showed a user named ‘apache’. Why would that user exist on a system that had never had Apache installed?

Ahhhhh… php-fpm. The default php-fpm user is ‘apache’ – I guess just assuming it will be installed alongside apache is easier than trying to figure out how to have the webserver and php-fpm run in the same group or something.

Edited /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf to set php-fpm’s user and group to ‘nginx’, then did

chown -R nginx.nginx /var/www/webroot
chmod -R 500 /var/www/webroot
chmod -R 700 /var/www/webroot/wp-content/uploads

Now the blog runs fine and permissions are as tight as possible without breaking things (so far lol).