I used this tutorial to setup a virtualenv and the nginx server. I did exactly what was told, but I still get a

Permission denied (13)

error when trying to access static content. I already set my static dir and the whole Django project to be owned by www-data.

Further on, if I ignore the static content and try to let everything run with emperor I run into more permission denied errors. Now for everytime I try to access the site.

root      8704  0.0  0.0  62780  1260 ?        Ss   16:19   0:00 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx
www-data  8705  0.0  0.0  63108  1680 ?        S    16:19   0:00 nginx: worker process
www-data  8706  0.0  0.0  63108  1680 ?        S    16:19   0:00 nginx: worker process
www-data  8707  0.0  0.0  63108  1680 ?        S    16:19   0:00 nginx: worker process
www-data  8708  0.0  0.0  63448  2276 ?        S    16:19   0:00 nginx: worker process

When starting uwsgi: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f19997fd07c0237a7435 as root When starting uwsgi with www-data:

root@vmd2719:~/energy1/energydrinks# uwsgi --ini django.ini --uid www-data --gid www-data
[uWSGI] getting INI configuration from django.ini
open("./python27_plugin.so"): No such file or directory [core/utils.c line 3321]
!!! UNABLE to load uWSGI plugin: ./python27_plugin.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory !!!
*** Starting uWSGI 1.9.6 (64bit) on [Mon Apr 15 16:24:49 2013] ***
compiled with version: 4.6.3 on 15 April 2013 11:52:36
os: Linux-3.2.0-40-generic #64-Ubuntu SMP Mon Mar 25 21:22:10 UTC 2013
nodename: vmd2719
machine: x86_64
clock source: unix
detected number of CPU cores: 1
current working directory: /root/energy1/energydrinks
writing pidfile to /tmp/energy-master.pid
detected binary path: /usr/local/bin/uwsgi
setgid() to 33
setuid() to 33
chdir(): Permission denied [core/uwsgi.c line 2063]
chdir(): Permission denied [core/uwsgi.c line 1249]
chdir(): Permission denied [core/uwsgi.c line 1269]

Nginx debug log on accessing a static file:

2013/04/15 16:20:25 [debug] 8708#0: *1 http filename: "/root/energy1/energydrinks/static/jgrowl/jquery.jgrowl.js"
2013/04/15 16:20:25 [debug] 8708#0: *1 add cleanup: 0000000001F68C10
2013/04/15 16:20:25 [error] 8708#0: *1 open() "/root/energy1/energydrinks/static/jgrowl/jquery.jgrowl.js" failed (13: Permission denied), client: 109.193.75.142, server: .de, request: "GET /static/jgrowl/jquery.jgrowl.js HTTP/1.1", host: ".de:8000", referrer: "http://.de:8000/member/register/"
2013/04/15 16:20:25 [debug] 8708#0: *1 http finalize request: 403, "/static/jgrowl/jquery.jgrowl.js?" a:1, c:1
2013/04/15 16:20:25 [debug] 8708#0: *1 http special response: 403, "/static/jgrowl/jquery.jgrowl.js?"
2013/04/15 16:20:25 [debug] 8708#0: *1 http set discard body
2013/04/15 16:20:25 [debug] 8708#0: *1 xslt filter header
2013/04/15 16:20:25 [debug] 8708#0: *1 charset: "" > "utf-8"
2013/04/15 16:20:25 [debug] 8708#0: *1 HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

So your nginx is running as www-data inside /root... That can't be good. /root is not accessible by normal users (unless you chmod +x it, which is a bad idea).

You should move your data outside of it, in /srv/http, /var/www or /home/whatever, but not in /root.