Question

I have installed apache 2.2 in centos 6. Everything worked fine when the apache folder was at its default location /var/www/html. Then I configured a Virtual host inside my users home folder. After that apache started showing Forbidden You don't have permission error when I tried to go to localhost or 127.0.0.1 from browser.

this is the code i used in httpd.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
        DocumentRoot "/home/anjan/workspace/mfs"
        ServerName anjan-centOS
        <Directory "/home/anjan/workspace/mfs">
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order Deny,Allow
                Allow from all
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I also disabled SElinux as was mentioned in some articles but in vain. If anyone could help me out it would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I solved the problem. After meddling with the permission of the system I found out that the user "anjan" who is owner of /home/anjan had read/write/execute permission on /home/anjan but the group "anjan", created when user "anjan" was created didn’t have any permission at all.

ls -l /home/

showed

drwx------. 28 anjan anjan 4096 Jan 21 13:19 anjan

so I changed the permission with this command

chmod -R 770 /home/anjan
ls -l /home/
drwxrwx---. 28 anjan anjan 4096 Jan 21 13:19 anjan

i found out under which user my apache is running from this thread. It was running under user "apache"

so I added user "apache" to group "anjan" with this command.

usermod -G anjan,apache apache

after that voila. No more Forbidden error.

P.S. I did everything as the root user.

UPDATE
It seems the provided link is broken now. Heres another one.

Just to be safe(to avoid future broken links), copying the command here. In terminal type –

ps axo user,group,comm | grep apache