[Django]-Nginx is throwing an 403 Forbidden on Static Files

MacOs El Capitan: At the top of nginx.conf write user username group_name

My user name is Kamil so i write:

user Kamil staff;

(word ‘staff’ is very important in macOS). This do the trick. After that you don’t need to change any permission in your project folder and files.

It seems the web server user doesn’t have read permissions to the static files.
You can solve this in 2 ways:

1. (easiest, safer) run the nginx as you app user instead of default nginx user. To do this, add the following in nginx.conf

   user your_app_user
   

   Replace your_app_user with appropriate unix username for your app. In this case the your_app_user already has necessary permissions to the static content.

2. Another way would be to to grant permissions for the web server user to the static dir.

The minimum fix that worked for me is:

sudo chmod -R 664 /home/ubuntu/virtualenv/myapp/myapp/homelaunch/static/
sudo chmod -R a+X /home/ubuntu/virtualenv/myapp/myapp/homelaunch/static/

(BTW, in my case the static folder is called collected_static)

The best solution in that case would be to add www-data to username group:

gpasswd -a www-data username

For your changes to work, restart nginx

nginx -s reload

Try specifying a user at the top of your nginx.conf, above the server section.

user www-data;

I had the same issue no long ago. It might be a combination of factors. I found how to fix 403 access denied by replacing the user in the nginx.conf file.

• I deployed my website on an ubuntu server using Digital Ocean.
• I created a new user on my new ubuntu server and give admin priviliges

    adduser newuser

    usermod -aG sudo newuser 

• I updated my new server and installed few packages

    sudo apt update

    sudo apt install python3-pip python3-dev libpq-dev postgresql postgresql-contrib nginx curl 

• I followed all this beautiful instruction on how to deploy your site on Digital Ocean
• Since I changed the user and I ssh into my new server using this new user, I need to replace the user on the nginx.conf. By default nginx.conf user is www-data:

    user www-data;

    worker_processes auto;

    pid /run/nginx.pid;

Then I replaced with my sudo user and solved my problem.

    user newuser;

    worker_processes auto;

    pid /run/nginx.pid;

• Then I restart nginx, gunicorn and postgresql(even if the last one it is not really necessary)

    sudo systemctl restart nginx 

    sudo systemctl restart gunicorn

    sudo systemctl restart postgresql

And tada.. no more issue.

Fix 403 error with Django static files on Ubuntu server.

1. Run this -> gpasswd -a www-data your_proj_username

2. Reload nginx -> nginx -s reload

3. Check chmod for your dirs: /home, /home/proj_dir, /home/proj_dir/static

• Run this – stat --format '%a' /home . Result must be 755
• Run this – stat --format '%a' /home/your_proj_dir/static . Result must be 755
• Run this – stat --format '%a' /home/your_proj_dir . Result must be 750

4. If you have different values you can try to change this:

• sudo chmod 755 /home
• sudo chmod 755 /home/your_proj_dir/static
• sudo chmod 750 /home/your_proj_dir

5. Reload you project-server. This solve all permission errors

After hours upon hours following so many articles, I ran across :
http://nicholasorr.com/blog/2008/07/22/nginx-engine-x-what-a-pain-in-the-bum/

which had a comment to chmod the whole django app dir, so I did:

sudo chmod -R myapp

This fixed it. Unbelievable!

Thanks to those who offered solutions to fix this.