Blank grey screen on static server (http/403)

[emilylange]

Hi

You are running into permission issues, despite your chmod --recursive a+r ~/web attempt.

Will explain in a second, but first:

The blank page you are seeing has an error attached, actually.
Sure, there is nothing to see on the website itself, but the browser devtools report a http/403 status code.

Your curl (thank for providing that, btw), shows it too:

@dangerdyke

< HTTP/2 403

---

A user (here: caddy), which tries to read a file (here: your website) on Linux, must have execution permissions (e.g chmod -R a+x) on every directory leading to your file.
This is just how Linux file permissions work

I’ve explained that a bit in the past in

Reverse proxy + static file serving results in 403 (Forbidden) for static files

Hi Thanks for providing so much info! The problem here seems to be (Linux) file permissions. While you did set 0777 (u=rwx,g=rwx,o=rwx) on the files you want to access, the caddy user still has to have execution access for every parent folder in the path to traverse/reach the file. This is nothing caddy can change - this is just how Linux file permissions work. Pick one: So you could either use a totally different folder like /srv or /var/www (recommended )…

but I haven’t tidied up it to a proper wiki article here yet *sigh*

Anyhow, so the tl;dr-ish version would be:
caddyserver runs as user caddy

@dangerdyke

[Service]
Type=notify
User=caddy
Group=caddy

Your website’s webroot is in /home/ubuntu/web

@dangerdyke

	root * /home/ubuntu/web

But the caddy user is missing the execution permissions on /home/ubuntu and maybe on /home/ubuntu/web.
You could just add the missing permission bit via chmod, but please don’t.
Just move your website into a proper location like /srv or /var/www and you are good.

The /home/$USER/ directory is missing the execution bit by default for a reason.
Other users aren’t supposed to have access to any file or directories in another users’ /home directory.