Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Apache error 403: Forbidden

I'd run into an annoying problem that is very easy to solve, once you know the answer... as usual.

I was starting a simple project to demostrate how to create an application using djondb as a NoSQL db and wrote some simple pages emulating the famous craigslist page, but as soon as I added the "<Directory>" directive to the apache server started to get the message:


Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /demo2/temp.html on this server.

Run to google... do some searches and all of the results pointed to file permission problems, I just went to the console and run the chmod a+rwx (I know.. it's not secure, but it's a demo pc), restarted apache and... puff.. the error kept popping up, read more... did some changes... and nothing the error persisted, then I crossed to a post that was really helpful Fixing 403 Forbidden on alias directory with Apache one of the answers suggested to login using the apache user, and try to navigate to the file.

As soon as I did that I realized that my folder was: /home/cross/workspace/db/demo... etc... and I changed the permissions to the "demo" directory, but not to all the parent folders (workspace/db) and that was causing the problem. I added my private group (cross) to the user www-data (the user used to start apache) and now everything is working.

usermod -a -G cross www-data

Easy? yes... I know it is but I want to share this "enlightened knowledge" in case you crossed with the same problem. Took 1 hour of my time to solve this, wondering why on earth the test application worked fine with the PC at my office (ubuntu 10.10) and didn't at my home PC with ubuntu 11.10. (Actually I still wonder why I didnt run into this problem at my office... the path is the same)

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