Nginx: stat() failed (13: permission denied)

I am using the default config while adding the specific directory with nginx installed on my ubuntu 12.04 machine. server { #listen 80; ## listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied #listen [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6 index index.html index.htm; # Make site accessible from http://localhost/ server_name localhost; location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then fall back to index.html root /username/test/static; try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules } ... ... } I just want a simple static nginx server to serve files out of that directory. However, checking the `error.log` I see 2014/09/10 16:55:16 [crit] 10808#0: *2 stat() "/username/test/static/index.html" failed (13: Permission denied), client:, server: localhost, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", host: "domain" 2014/09/10 16:55:16 [error] 10808#0: *2 rewrite or internal redirection cycle while internally redirecting to "/index.html I've already done `chown -R www-data:www-data` on `/username/test/static`, I've set them to `chmod 755`. I don't know what else needs to be set.