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

The resolution for this problem when dealing with the production server would be to make use of collectstatic as already mentioned that it used and resolved or give permissions to the folders. However if your solution is in a local environment, the solution can be acquired by configuring the local MEDIA directory in the settings.py file that acts on the local server.

So, would be adding these two lines in the local configuration file as @Nic Scozzaro mentioned:

MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join (BASE_DIR, 'media')
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join (BASE_DIR, 'static')

After the configuration restart the services to apply the fixes.

Create a 'MEDIA' directory in the root of your project. Then set:

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

To know which user you are logged on to:

$ whoami
ubuntu

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!

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 varwwwusers
sudo adduser www-data varwwwusers
sudo 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.