Cant Create Products

[JWMutant]

I have just finished installing magento 2.1.2 and Im trying to add a test product.

It wasnt letting me and simply coming up with an error which after removing sample from the error log tells me "

Can't create directory /var/www/html/magento/var/generation/Magento/Catalog/Model/Product/Attribute/Backend/Tierprice/.   

I have the folder permissions set to 777 across the board as it is on a local server and purely for testing.

Anyone have any ideas why its doing this?

[JWMutant]

I have a feeling I may have needed to run 

chown -R john:www-data /var/www/html/magento/

This may have been the problem I was having across the board with the install not going the way I wanted it to.

Will test tomorrow on a new VM.