New to nginx

Installed on mac os for use with aegir & drupal

It's running great, but I have a problem with permissions

My hostmaster installation is here : /var/aegir/hostmaster-6.x-1.7/ The hostmaster settings file here : /var/aegir/hostmaster-6.x-1.7/sites/aegir.ldev/settings.php

Permissions for settings.php are set to 440 automatically by hostmaster, but I'm getting a 403 forbidden page because of this.

If I give read permission to "other" the site works great (444 or even 004).

Drupal is also telling me that the file system paths are not writable (sites/aegir.ldev/files & sites/aegir.ldev/private). I would have to change the permissions there too. Moreover, I would also have to change permissions for every site installed by hostmaster. Anyway.

In my nginx.conf I have the following : user "myuser" _www;

Owner and group for settings.php, /sites/example.ldev/files, /sites/example.ldev/private are "myuser" and "_www".

Changing permissions to 004 solves this problem, but really confuses me. Why do "other" have permission and not owner or group?

I've checked the processes running in activity monitor. Nginx is running as "myuser". Except for one process running as root.

So I'm stumped. Hope someone can help.