As for NGINX, it sounds like it is a permission issue on some of your files and / or directories. Instead, I moved the application to the dedicated / home directory. For example, if you had a user named tester, your nginx.conf would say (the following works for me in Production:
server {
listen YOURIPADDRESSHERE:80;
server_name YOURFULLDOMAINNAMEHERE;
root /home/tester/YOURRAILSAPPNAME/public;
passenger_enabled on;
charset utf-8;
access_log /var/log/nginx/YOURFULLDOMAINNAMEHERE-ssl_access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/YOURFULLDOMAINNAMEHERE-ssl_error.log warn;
location /home/tester/YOURRAILSAPPNAME/public/ {
root html;
index index.html index.htm;
}
error_page 404 /404.html;
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root html;
}
}
Then make sure your rights are right (755 for all files, 644 for directories).