What is causing the '403 Forbidden error' in my Apache2 server? And how can I fix it? The available fixes on the web are not working for me

A little bit of context to my problem... I'm trying to deploy my django application following a tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa_kQheCnds) which uses linode to setup a linux apache server, and after following the steps, it always results in the same error, 403 Forbidden: You don't have permission to access this resource. I've followed the steps in this guide roughly 6 times now and I've determined that I'm definitely not doing anything the guy didn't do.

Something worth mentioning is that in the tutorial, Ubuntu 18.10 is being used, however I don't have Ubuntu 18.10 available, so I've tried it using Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 and 21.10.

In my sixth and latest attempt, I am using Ubuntu 21.10

I've also tried running the server with DEBUG=True to see if I can get a little more insight on the error, but it just displays the following:

The tutorial is very long so I've broken down every single step in this post.

The steps I had to follow are:

(everything done in the Windows Linux Bash shell)

• Creating Linode and analizing Ip Address and SSH Credentials I got

• Root Connection to the Server

  ssh into the server for the first time

• Installing Software Updates

  Running the command sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

• Setting Host Name

  hostnamectl set-hostname SERVER_NAME

  Then checking if it was rightfully executed with hostname

• Setting Host File

  nano /etc/hosts and then adding the IP address and server name to the file.

• Adding Limited User

  The guy in the video said it's not good practice to use root user because it's easy to mess things up like that so we created a limited user with adduser USER_NAME and then gave it sudo permissions with adduser USER_NAME sudo

• Setting Up SSH Key Based Authentication

  In my local machine's bash shell: ssh keygen -b 4096 And deposit that file into my home folder, after that I copy that file over to my server with scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@serverip:~/.ssh/authorized_keys then lasty confirming it was done correcty in the server with ls .ssh

• Setting Permissions for SSH Directory

  Attach certain permision like sudo chmod 700 ~/.ssh/ and sudo chmod 600 ~/.ssh/*

• Forbiding Root Login & Password Authentication

  sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshh_config to forbit #PermitRootLogin and #PasswordAuthentification and then restart with sudo systemctl restart sshd

• Setting Up a Firewall

  First, I install Uncomplicated Firewall with sudo apt-get install ufw and then I do the following commands: sudo ufw default allow outgoing , sudo ufw default deny incoming , sudo ufw allow ssh and sudo ufw allow 8000. After that, I enable the firewall with sudo ufw enable

• Generating requirements.txt File

  Here I actually did it a bit different that in the video. I open my VSCODE environment for the project in question, and then I run a pip freeze in the terminal to see if the dependencies are correct, if they are I write the requirements with pip freeze > requirements.txt

• Copying Django Application on to the Webserver

  This step is pretty straightforward. Just scp -r /folder/ user@serverip:~/ and that way the folder project is copied into the web server.

• Creating Virtual Environment on the Server

  First run a sudo apt-get install python3-pip and then pip install sudo apt-get install python3-venv. Once that's done, to create my virtual environment I do python3 -m venv django_project/venv and lastly I activate it by cding into the project's folder and then source venv/bin/activate.

• Installing Dependencies

  With my virtual environment running I run a pip install -r requirements.txt

• Changing Django Settings for Testing the Application on Django Server

  Inside the project's folder: sudo nano django_project/settings.py and add my server's IP to the allowed hosts list, and add a STATIC_ROOT directory.

• Collecting Static Files

  python manage.py collectstatic Which could collect about 120 static files, but my project is a somewhat different from the on in the video because I added way more features so it collects about 137 files (in case these details are needed)

• Testing Application

  python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000 and then test to see if there is any problems, there are not (minus some variables I forgot to add because they were in my PC's environment variables) so I move on to the next step.

• Installing Apache & ModWSGI

  sudo apt-get install apache2, sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3.

• Configuring Apache Webserver

  Then move into the apache configuration folder cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/ and create a new configuration file based off the default one with sudo cp 000-default.conf django_project.conf, and then I edit with sudo nano django_project.conf it and add the following things to it: https://github.com/CoreyMSchafer/code_snippets/blob/master/Django_Blog/snippets/django_project.conf

• Enabling Site Through Apache

  Run the following commands: sudo a2ensite django_project , sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf

• Setting Up File Permissions

  Run the following commands: sudo chown :www-date django_project/db.sqlite3 , sudo chmod 664 django_project/db.sqlite3 and sudo chown :www-data django_project/. Then sudo chown -R :www-data django_project/media/andsudo chmod -R django_project/media```

• Creating Configuration File for Hiding Sensitive Information

  I won't detail this process, I just make a .json file with some secret information like the SECRET_KEY and the email and password.

• Updating Project Settings File

  I delete the sentitive information from the settings.py of the project, and instead add those with the .json file (like if it were an environment variable).

• Allowing http Traffic

  Run the following commands: sudo ufw delete allow 8000, and sudo ufw allow http/tcp.

• Restarting the Server & Running the Site

  sudo service apache2 restart

Please, I'd appreciate any kind of help. I have to fix this error for a school project and I can't find solutions that actually fix it. I've read in some forums that I just needed to change certain permissions again, I did that and still the same error. It's really driving me crazy.

I've found a solution, for now at least. I ran a sudo chmod 777 on my home folder so that literally every single file is accessible. I heard that this solution was not recommendable, but for now it will do.

I still don't know why other solutions that were posted didn't work for me, because it was of my understanding that every file that was needed to fun the server was inside the django_project folder.

I will be looking into it a bit more though, because I don't know how secure it is to have everysingle file with permisions.