Django [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/www/media/animals/user_uploads'

I have solved this myself in the end.

When running on the development machines, I am in fact running using my current user's privileges. However, when running on the deployment server, I am in fact running through wsgi, which means it's running using www-data's privileges.

www-data is neither the owner nor in the group of users that own /var/www. This means that www-data is treated as other and has the permissions set to others.

The BAD solution to this would be to do:

sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www/

This would give everyone full access to everything in /var/www/, which is a very bad idea.

Another BAD solution would be to do:

sudo chown -R www-data /var/www/

This would change the owner to www-data, which opens security vulnerabilities.

The GOOD solution would be:

sudo groupadd varwwwuserssudo adduser www-data varwwwuserssudo chgrp -R varwwwusers /var/www/sudo chmod -R 760 /var/www/

This adds www-data to the varwwwusers group, which is then set as the group for /var/www/ and all of its subfolders. chmod will give read, write, execute permissions to the owner but the group will not be able to execute any script potentially uploaded in there if for example the webserver got hacked.

You could set it to 740 to make it more secure but then you won't be able to use Django's collectstatic functionality so stick to 760 unless you're very confident about what you're doing.

I had a similar issue in Django 1.10 and this page was the first google result, but the accepted solution did not solve my problem.

With a 'MEDIA' directory located in the root of my project for storing files, I just needed to set:

MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR,'MEDIA')

and then I stopped getting the error.

To know which user you are logged on to:

$ whoamiubuntu

And adding to your solution, if you are using an AWS Instance, you should add your user to the group to be able to access that folder:

Making a group for webservices users (varwwwusers)

$ sudo groupadd varwwwusers

Change the www folder and make it belong to varwwwusers

$ sudo chgrp -R varwwwusers /var/www/

www-data is the server making django requests, add that to the group

$ sudo adduser www-data varwwwusers

Change folder policy

$ sudo chmod -R 770 /var/www/

Add ubuntu to the group of varwwwusers

$ usermod -a -G varwwwusers ubuntu

Hope this helps!