Question

I got my new VPS server with CentOS 5.8, I could not transfer my domain yet but I want to reach my site via http://my-server-ip and since I am using laravel framework I need to change default DocumentRoot httpdocs to httpdocs/public I have tried to put those lines to httpd.conf file:

<VirtualHost my-server-ip:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/my.domain.org/httpdocs/public
ServerName  my.domain.org
</VirtualHost>

However after restarting apache it warns me like this:
Warning: DocumentRoot [/public] does not exist

What should I do?

Answer 1

You’ll need to enable read (and possibly execute) privileges on the directory. As root try:

# Recursively set the owner of this folder to 'www'
chown -R www /var/www/vhosts/my.domain.org/httpdocs/public

# Recursively give the owner read and execute privileges
chmod -R u+rx /var/www/vhosts/my.domain.org/httpdocs/public

As an alternative on some setups the user might be called nobody. So if www doesn’t work try:

chown -R nobody /var/www/vhosts/my.domain.org/httpdocs/public

EDIT:
As user tink pointed out in the comments
“…in Centos the user running apache is aptly called apache. In debian and it’s derivatives, it’s www-data.”