James's questions

I have a relatively fresh installation of LAMP on Ubuntu 12.04 (installed using tasksel). I've got a virtual host pointed at a development project in my home directory containing plain Hello World index.html. Apache is showing the directory index instead of displaying the index.html. The PDF here(page 190) says that the default DirectoryIndex is in /etc/apache2/mods-available/dir.conf, which I've confirmed, and mod_dir is enabled.

DirectoryIndex works inside a .htaccess in the project root directory, but I'd like to have it set up server-wide. I'm probably missing something simple.

I'm trying to set up an Apache Virtual Host for local development on a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.04. Here's my virtual host config inside /sites-available:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName morpho.local
ServerAlias www.morpho.local
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /home/james/projects/morpho

# Log file
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/morpho.local-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

I've added the symlink in /sites-enabled and restarted Apache. The document root contains a dummy "Hello World" index.html and nothing else. The www-data user is the owner of the directory and the index.html.

I get a 403 Forbidden when I browse to morpho.local, and this line is written (twice) to the Apache error log:

(13)Permission denied: /home/james/projects/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: 
  unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

This seems weird to me, because it's looking for a .htaccess file one directory up from the document root. Just to see what would happen, I created a .htaccess in that directory, and gave it 777 permissions and set owner and group to www-data. Same error in the log.

My guess is that I've missed something I need to do with permissions, but the fact that it's looking for a .htaccess one directory back is confusing.

Again, this is a fresh Ubuntu/Apache install and I haven't configured anything besides this single Virtual Host.

Edit: I got it working by setting the x permission on my dev folder, /home/james/projects. This allowed the www-data Apache user to see inside the directory. I'll try ghm1014's setup from the answers because that seems like a better solution. Although it seems like it would still require the x permission in order for www-data to follow the symlink, so I don't know if it gets around having to set that or not.

Thanks for your answers, regardless.