sqlite3.OperationalError: unable to open database file

Question

I get this error when setting up a server in Django. It is sqlite3 which means it should create the .db file but it doesn't seem to be doing so. I've stipulated SQLite as the backend and an absolute file path for where to put it, but no luck.

Is this a bug or am I doing something incorrect? (Was just thinking, is the absolute file path specified differently in Ubuntu?)

Here is the beginning of my settings.py file:

# Django settings for OmniCloud project.

DEBUG = True
TEMPLATE_DEBUG = DEBUG

ADMINS = (
# ('Your Name', '[email protected]'),
)

MANAGERS = ADMINS

DATABASES = {
'default': {
    'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3', # Add 'postgresql_psycopg2', 'postgresql', 'mysql', 'sqlite3' or 'oracle'.
    'NAME': '~/Harold-Server/OmniCloud.db',                      # Or path to database file if using sqlite3.
    'USER': '',                      # Not used with sqlite3.
    'PASSWORD': '',                  # Not used with sqlite3.
    'HOST': '',                      # Set to empty string for localhost. Not used with sqlite3.
    'PORT': '',                      # Set to empty string for default. Not used with sqlite3.
}
}

Solution 1

Django NewbieMistakes

PROBLEM You're using SQLite3, your DATABASE_NAME is set to the database file's full path, the database file is writeable by Apache, but you still get the above error.

SOLUTION Make sure Apache can also write to the parent directory of the database. SQLite needs to be able to write to this directory.

Make sure each folder of your database file's full path does not start with number, eg. /www/4myweb/db (observed on Windows 2000).

If DATABASE_NAME is set to something like '/Users/yourname/Sites/mydjangoproject/db/db', make sure you've created the 'db' directory first.

Make sure your /tmp directory is world-writable (an unlikely cause as other thing on your system will also not work). ls /tmp -ald should produce drwxrwxrwt ....

Make sure the path to the database specified in settings.py is a full path.

Also make sure the file is present where you expect it to be.

Solution 2

I faced exactly same issue. Here is my setting which worked.

'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3', 
'NAME': '/home/path/to/your/db/data.sqlite3'

Other setting in case of sqlite3 will be same/default.
And you need to create data.sqlite3.

Solution 3

You haven't specified the absolute path - you've used a shortcut , ~, which might not work in this context. Use /home/yourusername/Harold-Server/OmniCloud.db instead.

Solution 4

You need to use full path instead of ~/.

In your case, something like /home/harold/Harold-Server/OmniCloud.db.

Solution 5

In my case the sqlite db file db.sqlite3 was stored in the DocumentRoot of apache. So, even after setting the following permissions it didn't work:

sudo chown www-data:www-data /path/to/db-folder
sudo chown www-data:www-data /path/to/db-folder/sqlite-db.db

Finally when i moved db.sqlite3 to a newly created folder dbfolder under DocumentRoot and gave the above permissions, and it worked.

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