You're running into this error because the Docker container is trying to create or write to the db.sqlite3 file, but the user it's running as (appuser) doesn't have permission. This usually happens when you mount your local project directory (.) into the container (/app), which overrides the internal folder's permissions. To fix it, you can either run the container as root, change the permissions of your local folder with chmod -R 777 ., or make sure the /app directory inside the container is owned by the right user by using COPY --chown=appuser:appuser . . and setting write permissions if needed.