Addendum added : With the default example Gitea configuration, I found that I was still getting Unauthorized errors. I had to watch the network calls to get access to the full error message. The problem was that even though I was authenticated, I was not actually authorized. I had to chose to either enable the allowAllUsers setting, or I needed to add specific users to the whitelist. (Details posted at https://kevin.thecorams.net/posts/2020/07/nginx-oauth-addendum/ )