Error message “Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server” [closed]

Answer 1

    I changed 
    Order Deny,Allow
    Deny From All      in .htaccess to   " Require all denied "    and restarted apache but it did not help.

Path for apache2.conf in ubuntu is /etc/apache2/apache.conf

Then I added following lines in apache2.conf and then my folder is working fine

    <Directory /path of required folder>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride All
            Require all granted
       </Directory>

   and run  " Sudo service apache2 restart " 

Answer 2

After changing the configuration files don't forget to Restart All Services.

I wasted three hours of my time on it.

Answer 3

A common gotcha for directories hosted outside of the default /var/www/ is that the Apache user doesn't just need permissions to the directory and subdirectories where the site is being hosted. Apache requires permissions to all the directories all the way up to the root of the file system where the site is hosted. Apache automatically gets permissions assigned to /var/www/ when it's installed, so if your host directory is directly underneath that then this doesn't apply to you. Edit: Daybreaker has reported that his Apache was installed without correct access permissions to the default directory.

For example, you've got a development machine and your site's directory is:

/username/home/Dropbox/myamazingsite/

You may think you can get away with:

chgrp -R www-data /username/home/Dropbox/myamazingsite/
chmod -R 2750 /username/home/Dropbox/myamazingsite/

because this gives Apache permissions to access your site's directory? Well that's correct but it's not sufficient. Apache requires permissions all the way up the directory tree so what you need to do is:

chgrp -R www-data /username/
chmod -R 2750 /username/

Obviously I would not recommend giving access to Apache on a production server to a complete directory structure without analysing what's in that directory structure. For production it's best to keep to the default directory or another directory structure that's just for holding web assets.

Edit2: as u/chimeraha pointed out, if you're not sure what you're doing with the permissions, it'd be best to move your site's directory out of your home directory to avoid potentially locking yourself out of your home directory.

Answer 4

I understand this issue is resolved but I happened to solve this same problem on my own.

The cause of

Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server

is actually the default configuration for an apache directory in httpd.conf.

#
# Each directory to which Apache has access can be configured with respect
# to which services and features are allowed and/or disabled in that
# directory (and its subdirectories). 
#
# First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of 
# features.  
#
<Directory "/">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all          # the cause of permission denied
</Directory>

Simply changing Deny from all to Allow from all should solve the permission problem.

Alternatively, a better approach would be to specify individual directory permissions on virtualhost configuration.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ....

    # Set access permission
    <Directory "/path/to/docroot">
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ....
</VirtualHost>

As of Apache-2.4, however, access control is done using the new module mod_authz_host (Upgrading to 2.4 from 2.2). Consequently, the new Require directive should be used.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ....

    # Set access permission
    <Directory "/path/to/docroot">
        Require all granted
    </Directory>

    ....
</VirtualHost>

Answer 5

There is another way to solve this problem. Let us say you want to access directory "subphp" which exist at /var/www/html/subphp, and you want to access it using 127.0.0.1/subphp and you receive error like this:

You don't have permission to access /subphp/ on this server.

Then change the directory permissions from "None" to "access files". A command-line user can use the chmod command to change the permission.

Answer 6

If you are using MAMP Pro the way to fix this is by checking the Indexes checkbox under the Hosts - Extended tab.

In MAMP Pro v3.0.3 this is what that looks like: