SQLITE_PERMERRORTier 2 — Caution⚠️ MEDIUM confidenceAccess permission denied
🔴 Production Risk Error
High — all writes will fail until permissions are corrected.
What this means
SQLITE_PERM (3) is returned when the OS denies access to a file that SQLite needs to open or create. The file exists but the process lacks read or write permission.
Why it happens
- 1Database file owned by a different user with no group/world permissions.
- 2Read-only filesystem (e.g., Docker volume mounted read-only).
- 3SELinux or AppArmor policy blocking file access.
- 4WAL journal file or shm file not writable.
How to reproduce
Occurs on sqlite3_open() or the first write operation if permissions changed after open.
import os, sqlite3
os.chmod('my.db', 0o000)
try:
sqlite3.connect('my.db')
except sqlite3.OperationalError as e:
print(e) # unable to open database fileFix 1
Why this works
Check file and parent directory permissions: ls -la my.db
Fix 2
Why this works
Fix ownership: chown appuser:appuser my.db
Fix 3
Why this works
Fix permissions: chmod 664 my.db
Fix 4
Why this works
Ensure the WAL sidecar files (-wal, -shm) are also writable.
What not to do
Why it's wrong:
Sources
📚 Official docs: https://www.sqlite.org/rescode.html#perm
🔧 Source ref: sqlite3.h — SQLITE_PERM = 3
📖 Further reading: SQLite file locking and concurrency
Confidence assessment
⚠️ MEDIUM confidence
Stable. Standard OS permission denial.
See also
🔗 Related errors
📄 Reference pages