Request Entity Too Large when uploading image to media library on Strapi

I just ran into this issue myself. It turns out that it is actually NGINX causing this issue, rather than strapi.

This can be verified by opening the networking tab in the browser dev tools, then triggering the error. The request status should be 413. Click on the failing request then select the ‘Response’ tab. It should be an NGINX error page including “413 Request Entity Too Large” and “nginx/1.14.2” (your version number may differ).

I see you are having problems with sudo. What user are you SSHing into the droplet as? I believe the digital ocean default is root. If you SSH in as root, you do not need to use sudo. sudo is used to give root powers to non-root users. So if you are root, just omit the sudo part of the command.

Once I confirmed NGINX to be the culprit, I found this serverfault post with the answer. To summarize the relevant parts of that post and expand a bit (all commands should be run as root):

1. edit /etc/nginx/nginx.conf on the server: nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
2. Find client_max_body_size in the http block or add it if it doesn’t exist. I picked 20MB as max: client_max_body_size 20M;
3. Validate the config file syntax: nginx -t
4. Restart nginx: systemctl restart nginx
5. Verify that nginx restarted correctly: systemctl status nginx (look for “Active: active(running)” in the output)

This resolved the error for me. Let me know if that works for you, or if you need me clarify anything. Best of luck!