Gitea install on different working directory

Hello, I am trying to setup Gitea on a different partition (/var/repo/gitea) instead of the default (/var/lib/gitea) and every time I start the service it always fails at:

Failed to list locale files: open /var/repo/gitea/custom/options/locale: permission denied

Then it restarts, I tried manually adding the directory, re-ran chmod and chown commands, ran restorecon on the directory but still no luck.

It works fine when set up on the default directory though I had to manually create the sub-directories needed but I cannot make it work when I try to set a different path. I followed the official Gitea documentation but only made some changes on the files where /var/lib/gitea is replaced by /var/repo/gitea

Can anybody advise? thank you.

Check the permissions of this directory.

Reran the following commands:

chown -R git:git /var/repo/gitea/
chmod -R 750 /var/repo/gitea/

Also did the following:

Disabled SELinux

restorecon -rv /usr/local/bin/gitea

Still, no luck with the same error…

Does the location /var/repo/gitea/custom/options/locale exist?