Question

After reading through various tutorials [1] I still can’t get my VirtualHost settings to work as desired. I’m getting a 403 Forbidden when I try to use a VirtualHost with a directory below my user directory as its DocumentRoot.

What I’ve done so far

• Created file /etc/apache2/sites-available/workspace with following content:

  NameVirtualHost *:80
  <VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerName project-site
      DocumentRoot /home/user/Workspace/project/site
  </VirtualHost>
  

• Edited file /etc/hosts now yielding:

  127.0.0.1   localhost
  127.0.1.1   my-machine
  
  # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
  ::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
  fe00::0 ip6-localnet
  ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
  ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
  ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
  
  # VirtualHosts added by me
  127.0.0.1   project-site
  

• Enabled virtual hosts using sudo a2ensite workspace

• Restarted Apache using sudo services apache2 restart
• Tried opening http://project-site and http://project-site/test.html (where test.html is present in /home/user/Workspace/project/site/) in my webbrowser

What happens

• Restarting Apache I get the following messages on the command line:

  * Restarting web server apache2
  apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName
  [Sun May 13 10:33:37 2012] [warn] NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts
  [ OK ]
  

• Opening either http://project-site or http://project-site/test.html a “403 Forbidden” is served.

What should happen

I’d like to have the contents of /home/user/Workspace/project/site being served when I browse to http://project-site.

What I learned so far

From reading similar questions on this site I learned that this is probably a permission problem [2]. Files in /home/user/Workspace/project/site might not be readable by www-data. But how do I know or correct this?

Furthermore .htaccess files were mentioned [3] being located in

/home/.htaccess
/home/user/.htacces
[...]
/home/user/path/to/project/.htaccess

and possibly not readable. I never created them, I don’t want them, will I need them?

The second answer to another question [4] made me use NameVirtualHost responsible for the warning on restart of Apache. Is it necessary and if, how do I use it properly?

Any help is much appreciated! Tell me, if you need to know anything else to locate the problem.

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Ressources

1. http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/07/apache-virtual-host/, http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/name-based.html, http://mintarticles.com/read/software-articles/multiple-virtual-hosts-in-xampplampp-in-ubuntu,977/, http://www.pgorecki.pl/content/virtual-host-na-localho%C5%9Bcie-apache-ubuntu, ...
2. Apache VirtualHost 403 Forbidden
3. Ubuntu, Apache, virtualhost and Access forbidden
4. VirtualHost configuration

Answer 1

I found the following solution, not satisfying me, but solving my primary problem. Indeed it is about permissions like suggested in [1]. My /home/user directory was not accessible to the webserver. In order to grant minimal possible permissions I used

chmod 701 /home/user

to make it accessible. Additionally I recursively gave group ownership to www-data for the webroot of the virtual host like recommended in [2], but I’m not sure, whether this is necessary.

sudo chown -R user:www-data /home/user/Workspace/project/site
sudo chmod -R g+s /home/user/Workspace/project/site

I’m going to ask for a more elegant solution in a separate question.

Regarding the other problems mentioned, I found out the following with the help of [3] besides other resources:

• It is not necessary and may cause an error to have NameVirtualHost *:80 in the virtual hosts description, if it appears in one of apaches other configuration files.
• To let apache know about its fully qualified domain name being localhost one creates a file /etc/apache2/conf.d/fqdn with content ServerName localhost.

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1. https://stackoverflow.com/a/7576526/948404
2. https://stackoverflow.com/a/9133067/948404
3. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP