Fixing 403 Forbidden on alias directory with Apache

Question

I am trying to setup an alias to point to some directory on my filesystem not in DocumentRoot. Now I get a 403 Forbidden response. These are the steps taken: 1. edit http.conf, adding:

Alias /example "/Users/user/Documents/example"

then...

<Directory "/Users/user/Documents/example">
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
   AllowOverride None
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all</Directory>

2. setting permissions with chmod in terminal:

chmod 755 /Users/user/Documents/example

Now it should work? instead I get the access forbidden. This is the output from error_log:

[Sun Jul 24 06:57:57 2011] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] (13)Permission denied: access to /example denied

Answer 1

I was having this issue on OS X too. It turned out gliptak was right, but I've some more detail to add.

We're both attempting to configure a virtual directory for a folder under a user's home folder; I think this is why we're having the problem. In my case, I had the following setup:

• Home folder is /Users/calrion.
• Virtual directory folder is /Users/calrion/Path/to/www.
• There's a symlink /Users/calrion/Path pointing to /Volumes/Other/Users/calrion/Path.

The problem was the user and group _www (which Apache runs as on OS X) lacked execute access to /Users/calrion and /Volumes/Other/Users/calrion.

Running chmod o+x /Users/calrion and chmod o+x /Volumes/Other/Users/calrion resolved the issue (on OS X 10.7.4).

The rule here is that Apache requires execute access to all folders in the path in order to serve files. Without this, you'll get a HTTP 403 (forbidden).