html - Apache giving 403 forbidden errors

Question

Ok, so i've previously set up two virtual hosts and they are working cool. they both house simple web projects and work fine with http://project1 and http://project2 in the browser.

Anyway, I've come to add another vhost. I edited the /etc/hosts file with 127.0.0.1 project3 and also updated the httpd-vhosts.conf file by copy and pasting the previous entries for project2 and editing the file path.

I've checked all the file and folder permissions (in fact I copied and pasted from project2) and simply put a "hello world" message in the index.php file.

I get a 403 forbidden permission denied message when accessing http://project3

Why is this, I just can figure out what step I've missed as everything seems to be set up correct.

Answer 1

Check that :

• Apache can physically access the file (the user that run apache, probably www-data or apache, can access the file in the filesystem)
• Apache can list the content of the folder (read permission)
• Apache has a "Allow" directive for that folder. There should be one for /var/www/, you can check default vhost for example.

Additionally, you can look at the error.log file (usually located at /var/log/apache2/error.log) which will describe why you get the 403 error exactly.

Finally, you may want to restart apache, just to be sure all that configuration is applied. This can be generally done with /etc/init.d/apache2 restart. On some system, the script will be called httpd. Just figure out.