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.