Question

I'm getting a 403 forbidden error when trying to access static files

I’m trying to deploy a Django website with Nginx and Gunicorn. The web application is running but it gives me a 403 error when it tries to access the static files. I have followed the tutorial from Digital Ocean and added a file to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled as described in the tutorial.

See tutorial: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-django-with-postgres-nginx-and-gunicorn-on-ubuntu-18-04#step-10-configure-nginx-to-proxy-pass-to-gunicorn

Does anyone know why I’m getting the 403?


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KFSys
Site Moderator
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September 13, 2022

Hi @a1ef7983c344-4055-b959-0b945c,

From what I can think of, this issue can be produced by wrong permissions or/and ownership.

You can check the Django permissions and how they should be done however usually for files it’s 644 and for folders it’s 755.

To change all the directories to 755 (drwxr-xr-x):

  1. find /path/to/folder -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

To change all the files to 644 (-rw-r–r–):

  1. find /path/to/folder -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Where /path/to/folder is the path to the folder you want to change its permissions.

Remember that find works recursively so everything inside of /path/to/folder will have its permissions changed.

As for ownership. You need to check what user and group your Nginx is using and change the ownership of your Django files :

  1. chown -R nginxUser:nginxGroup /pathj/to/folder

Where nginxUser:nginxGroup are the real Nginx’s user and group which can be viewed from the /etc/nginx/ folder and the /path/to/folder again is where your Django project is.

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