Add NGINX Users to nginx-agent Group

Overview

During installation, NGINX Agent detects the NGINX user (typically nginx) for the master and worker processes and adds this user to a group called nginx-agent.

If you change the NGINX username after installing the NGINX Agent, you’ll need to add the new username to the nginx-agent group so that the NGINX socket has the proper permissions.

A failure to update the nginx-agent group when the NGINX username changes may result in non-compliance errors for NGINX Plus.

NGINX Socket

NGINX Agent creates a socket in the default location /var/run/nginx-agent/nginx.sock. You can customize this location by editing the nginx-agent.conf file and setting the path similar to the following example:

nginx:
 ...
 socket: "unix:/var/run/nginx-agent/nginx.sock"

The socket server starts when the NGINX socket configuration is enabled; the socket configuration is enabled by default.

Add NGINX Users to nginx-agent Group

To manually add NGINX users to the nginx-agent group, take the following steps:

Verify the nginx-agent group exists:
```
sudo getent group | grep nginx-agent
```
The output looks similar to the following example:
```
nginx-agent:x:1001:root,nginx
```
If the group doesn’t exist, create it by running the following command:
```
sudo groupadd nginx-agent
```
Verify the ownership of /var/run/nginx-agent directory:
```
ls -l /var/run/nginx-agent
```
The output looks similar to the following:
```
total 0
srwxrwxr-x 1 root nginx-agent 0 Jun 13 10:51 nginx.sockvv
```
If the group ownership is not nginx-agent, change the ownership by running the following command:
```
sudo chown :nginx-agent /var/run/nginx-agent
```
To add NGINX user(s) to the nginx-agent group, run the following command:
```
sudo usermod -a -G nginx-agent <username>
```
For example to add the nginx user, take the following step:
```
sudo usermod -a -G nginx-agent nginx
```
Repeat for all NGINX users.