My notes on the 403 Forbidden Issue

I'm by no means a Mac expert yet as I bought mine to do iPhone development earlier this year. I've been around Linux and Unix for a while though and have a lot of experience with the Apache web server so here's my take on the "fix" that

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306884

describes. The tech doc describes a recipe. I'm going to describe the essence and the goal and taken together you should be clear on what needs to happen.

The access permission configuration for the personal web folder on your Mac needs to be specified to Apache. My user name is "don" so my access permissions for this folder look like:

<Directory "/Users/don/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

This needs to be in a file whose pathname on the Leopard system is:

/etc/apache2/users/don.conf

So if your Mac user name is say "tony" then your's would be

<Directory "/Users/tony/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

and be located in

/etc/apache2/users/tony.conf

So do what you gotta do to make that happen using your text editor in plain text mode.

Finally, at the end of the day this Apache configuration file needs to be readable by Apache which means that it should belong to the root user and the wheel group. To make that happen you can open a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo chown root:wheel /etc/apache2/users/tony.conf

It will no doubt ask you to authenticate using your admin password for the system as this is system level stuff that you are messing with.

where "tony.conf" is replaced with "yourname.conf" whatever "yourname" is.

Now once this has all been done Apache needs to be stopped and restarted which they tell you to do by unclicking web sharing in the sharing folder of your System Preferences under the Internet and Network section, applying it and then re-clicking it and apply it again. But if you just want to reboot your system that should do it too (assuming you've already elected web sharing which got you the 403 error in the first place.)

Apparently the upgrade to Leaopard from Tiger blew this part requiring a bit of manual intervention. I came to the Mac after Leopard so I never had this issue.

For completness, the following is my conf file listing from a command prompt showing permissions and rights for reference:

dons-macbook:users don$ ls -la /etc/apache2/users/don.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 139 May 2 16:38 /etc/apache2/users/don.conf