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Accepted
Agvorth
Asked: 2009-11-25 18:53:39 +0800 CST

Why am I getting this 403 Forbidden error?

  • 772

SOLUTION

Apache needs at least execute permissions on all the parent directories of the vhost dir.

I'm trying to set up a Rails app running under Apache on CentOS 4.3. I'm using Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) I made sure the app deployment dir is owned by group Apache and the permissions are set to allow the group to read it.

In my Apache config I have...

<VirtualHost *:80>

  ServerAdmin [email protected]
  DocumentRoot "/home/sneedmoure/deployed_rails_apps/myapp/current/public" 
  ServerName myapp.com
  ServerAlias www.myapp.com
  ErrorLog "logs/myapp.com-error_log"
  CustomLog "logs/myapp.com-access_log" common
  CustomLog "logs/myapp.com-deflate_log" deflate

  <Directory "/home/sneedmoure/deployed_rails_apps/myapp/current/public">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
#AllowOverride all       # Not sure whether I need this
    Options -MultiViews  # Passenger docs say to include this
  </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

When I try to access my app in the browser I get a 403 error.

In the error log I'm getting entries like...

[Wed Nov 25 03:01:19 2009] [error] [client 123.456.789.12] (13)Permission denied: access to / denied

I've tried different paths within the app and get the same result. It does work fine on my development machine.

Any notion what I'm doing wrong?

linux

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The only reason I can think of is that the web server user doesn't have access to that directory (/home/sneedmoure/deployed_rails_apps/myapp/current/public).

    You could verify that by su-ing to the web server user account and trying to list the directory.

    • 1

  2. Is there an index file (e.g. index.html, index.htm, etc) in that directory? If there isn't, it could be complaining b/c any request for that dir appears as an attempt to retrieve the directory listing. Can you create a blank file in that directory (e.g. test.txt) and successfully get it to load in a browser?

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