I'm working on a local development VM and trying to test serving my site with gunicorn and nginx as a reverse proxy for static resources only. The site loads minus static resources with user nginx; in nginx.conf. Attempting to load a static resource individually reveals a 403 Forbidden error.

For background. The static resources are in a shared folder under /media/sf_work. All files are owned by root:vboxsf (VirtualBox default). My user account on the system has been added to the vboxsf group, and I have full access to the shared folder.

For comparison, I tried changing the nginx.conf user to my user account. In that scenario, the static files did load, but then the homepage itself gives a 403 Forbidden error. So, I then tried adding the nginx user to the vboxsf group, but then everything gives a 403 Forbidden error. After further investigation it seems that if the nginx.conf user is in any group, it results in a 403 Forbidden.

Any idea what could possibly be going on here?