Nginx: Permission denied for nginx on Ubuntu

I am new to system administration. After installing nginx [via puppet][1] on Ubuntu I get the following output: [alert] could not open error log file: open() "/var/log/nginx/error.log" failed (13: Permission denied) [warn] 1898#0: the "user" directive makes sense only if the master process runs with super-user privileges, ignored in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:1 [emerg] 1898#0: open() "/var/log/nginx/access.log" failed (13: Permission denied) How do I get rid of all of these messages? I don't want to use command line directly (chown / chmod) and repeat it every time I create a new server. Therefore, I am thinking of what has to be added to the puppet manifest. What is the best sysadmin practice in this case: to change owner / permissions for /var/log/nginx or to store logs in different location? If chown / chmod is the way to go, which specific permissions would ensure the highest level of security? I tried this, but it didn't help: file { '/var/log/nginx': ensure => directory, mode => '0755', owner => 'www-data', group => 'www-data', recurse => true } Edited: vagrant@precise64:~$ ps aux | grep [n]ginx root 1001 0.0 0.1 62908 1388 ? Ss 08:47 0:00 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx www-data 1002 0.0 0.1 63260 1696 ? S 08:47 0:00 nginx: worker process www-data 1003 0.0 0.1 63260 1696 ? S 08:47 0:00 nginx: worker process www-data 1004 0.0 0.1 63260 1696 ? S 08:47 0:00 nginx: worker process www-data 1005 0.0 0.1 63260 1696 ? S 08:47 0:00 nginx: worker process [1]: https://github.com/kasperisager/puppet-nginx