permission in apache

[Jez Hancock]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 05:29:11AM -0700, Mike Maltese wrote:
> This shouldn't have anything to do with UNIX permissions. You'll get this
> error (403) if there is no document by the name specified in the
> DirectoryIndex directive (defualt is index.html) and the directory does not
> have the Indexes option (display directory contents). So either create
> index.html in that directory, or add Indexes to the Options for that
> directory to view the list of files. These options can be set on a per-vhost
> basis.
A 403 error would occur if a DirectoryIndex file exists (index.html say)
and permissions on that file in the DocumentRoot were such that it can't
be accessed by the apache user.

Further it could be the case that permissions on the file itself, say
/usr/local/www/vhost/index.html, were 755 but still the error occurs.
Usually this is because the permissions on a parent directory somewhere
up the directory tree are set so that the apache user can't read files
under that directory structure.  For example /usr/local/www might be set
to 750 and owned 'root:wheel' - so the 'other' group (which the apache
user falls into) cannot read files under that directory tree.

In summary make sure the EUID user apache is running as has access to
the DocumentRoot directory as well as the files it needs to access of
course.

FWIW you can check if the apache user has perms to read somefile.txt by doing:

echo "ls -al somefile.txt" | su -fm www

as root.

-- 
Jez

http://www.munk.nu/