Question about permissions

[ghidorahfan]

I'm not too familiar with python applications, but I did manage to get this somewhat running. However, in order to get the app to work, I had to change the group to the apache user (www-data) and I was able to see the web app. However, after I tried to set the debug to false, all I get is a 500 error. Reason I turned it off was to be able to send out emails through my SMTP settings. When I commented out the debug smpt settings (so mine would run), I'd get a permissions error as below.
PermissionError at /en/software/features
[Errno 13] Permission denied: '/CACHE'
Is anyone else running into similar issues? Should I have not given www-data group ownership of the wger directory (other than the db directory as in the instructions)? If so, then how would you deal with the 403 error? Thanks.

[ghidorahfan]

Permissions of wger directory

Apache site conf file
If this helps at all