Nginx & SELinux
The digitalocean box on which this blog is currently running on is a Fedora 21. I tried to configure nginx to serve static images stored on /srv, but got 'failed (13: Permission denied)' errors on open() and stat().
Googling mostly resulted in SO asking me to do chowns and chmods, which had no effect whatsoever. (Even 777! Desperation!)
One of the better solutions asked me to check whether +x is enabled on all parent directories for nginx to chdir into it - namei -x /srv/<folders> - but the folders already had the sufficient permissions. Another suggested doing sudo -u nginx stat /srv/<folders>/ to check whether nginx could stat the directory as stat was failing, and again it worked without any errors.
Delving deeper (page 2 of Google ;)), there were posts which talked more about SELinux which I ignorantly dismissed thinking it was another flavor of linux. This time I paid more attention and they talked of disabling it and the comments beneath them admonished against it.
Finally this gave me peace! Bless you kyl191! :D
Seriously though. There ought to be more posts on this!
For giving nginx access to /srv
$ sudo semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_content_t "/srv(/.*)?"
$ sudo restorecon -R -v /srv