nginx: [emerg] open() “/usr/share/nginx/off” failed (13: Permission denied) [SOLVED]

After a failed restart of the nginx server, you can get this error typing journalctl -xe:

nginx: [emerg] open() “/usr/share/nginx/off” failed (13: Permission denied) [SOLVED]

This is caused by a misconfiguration of nginx.conf or a conf inside the /etc/nginx/conf.d/ directory where there’s something like:

error_log off;

This is the wrong way to disable logs. Nginx is actually trying to write a file called off inside the default folder.

The right way

To disable error_log simply do not declare it in your .conf file.

To stop logging accesses, you can disable access_log writing in your .conf file:

access_log off;