Nginx 504 Gateway Timeout Error for Django

I know I'm late to the party here but after trying many of these suggestions (and others) I eventually found the timeout for me was occurring from my DNS - if you're using Amazon load balancers they have an "Idle timeout" set at 120s default.

I found the solution as I was trying to make changes in /etc/nginx/sites-available/django-project. But I needed to add following lines in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf the global settings for Nginx. Lines I've added are:

http {
    ...
    proxy_connect_timeout   10;
    proxy_send_timeout      15;
    proxy_read_timeout      20;
}

I have a small website hosted and this one above settings are enough. But others may set their settings according to their needs.

If you are using uwsgi with django, then you might add uwsgi_read_timeout directive to nginx's config file at location place

location / { 
    uwsgi_read_timeout 120; 
}