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Accepted
liewl
Asked: 2011-01-23 19:27:35 +0800 CST

403 error when trying to access webroot

  • 772

I was messing around with virtual hosts and now I'm getting a 403 error when trying to access files on the webroot.

Here's my httpd-vhosts.conf:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www
</VirtualHost>


<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName test.ts
    DocumentRoot /var/www/htdocs/vhost_test 
    <Directory /var/www/htdocs/vhost_test>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I'm pretty sure its a problem with vhosts because I commented out the line that included httpd-vhosts.conf on httpd.conf and the problem was gone. What's wrong with it?

EDIT: a day after Phil Hollenback helped me with this problem, the server began acting up again. Same problem as before, and doing what I did before didn't solve it this time. So I tried changing httpd-vhosts.conf with this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www
    <Directory />                   #added this tag
        Allow from all
    <Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Now it's working.

apache-2.2 virtualhost http-status-code-403 forbidden

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Grep for DocumentRoot in your other conf files, like httpd.conf - is it defined anywhere outside of your vhosts? It's unclear from your question and the followups if your default DocumentRoot is actually in /var/www. You could have a different DocumentRoot pointing at an entirely different directory tree that's not /var/www - in which case changing permissions on /var/www won't affect anything.

    Also when you say 'access files on the webroot' what do you mean exactly? How are you accessing the files?

    • 2

  2. Did you do 

    Chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

    Make sure the user that apache is running as has permission to access /var/www

    Hope that helps, RayQuang

    • 1

  3. Do you have a default document defined anywhere? If that's missing or doesn't include the filename you're using as your default a 403 is often returned.

    • 1