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On my Ubuntu server, I've changed my /var/www directory to a subfolder inside of my home directory, and I'm now getting 403 "Forbidden" errors in my browser. I've read through a lot of similar questions, but none of the answers have worked for me. These are the steps I've followed:

In /etc/apache2/apache2.conf, I changed

<Directory /home/var/www>

To:

<Directory /home/bob/Dropbox/Uniserver/www>

I did the same thing in /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf:

DocumentRoot /var/www

To:

DocumentRoot /home/bob/Dropbox/UniServer/www

(Only for troubleshooting), I ran:

chmod 777 -R /home/bob/Dropbox/UniServer/www

I also ran:

chown -R www-data /home/bob/Dropbox/UniServer/www

Also for troubleshooting, I ran the same command for my entire home directory. I restarted Apache a million times:

sudo service apache2 restart

But typing 'localhost' into my browser still returns a 403 "Forbidden" error. Any ideas?

|improve this question
  • I know you said this is just for troubleshooting, but you never want, or need, to give world-write access to your web folder, and you want to avoid giving write access to the www-data user/group to anything. Read-only access is enough, and is much preferred for security reasons. Sorry this doesn't answer your question though. – thomasrutter Dec 9 '14 at 6:25
  • Can you find the relevant lines from /var/log/apache2/error.log (hope I'm remembering correctly) when this 403 forbidden error occurs? You may need to use sudo to even look in that log directory. – thomasrutter Dec 9 '14 at 6:27
  • What is the output of sudo -u www-data namei -l /home/bob/Dropbox/UniServer/www? – muru Dec 9 '14 at 7:28
  • Did you download apache, MYSQL and PHP seperatly? Or did you get a stack (e.g. XAMPP)? – SomeAmbigiousUserName Dec 9 '14 at 8:57

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