Solution: Apache2 personal web sharing 403 Forbidden error

Question

Many people are puzzled about Apache 2 throwing 403 Forbidden errors when accessing the user's personal website, although the computer website works. And a lot of incorrect solutions are floating around. I decided to post some info that hopefully will clarify the issue.
As an example, my new Mac mini would run a website OK at http://192.168.0.2/ but my personal website at http://192.168.0.2/~username/ would give a 403 Forbidden error. I believe I have found out why. This is due to incorrect user-level settings that I believe were migrated from a previous OS version. I migrated from an old Power Mac G5 Quad with MacOS X 10.5 to my new Mac mini with MacOS X Lion 10.7.
The problem here is that Apache denies access to the user level Sites folder. If you create a new user on Lion, the system will create a username.conf, where username is the user's short name. But if you migrated from a previous version, this file will not exist, so Apache will not serve pages from the user's Sites folder. Some people tried to fix this by modifying httpd.conf, for example, by putting virtual hosts on the computer's main site. But that's not the right place to fix it. This should be fixed at the username.conf level. So.. look for this file with your username:
    /private/etc/apache2/users/yourusername.conf
If it does not exist, you will have to create it in a text editor, and change the owners. First get a text editor and create it, for example you could do this in pico
    sudo pico /private/etc/apache2/users/yourusername.conf
Then add this to the file and save it:
    <Directory "/Users/yourusername/Sites/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews ExecCGI
    AllowOverride AuthConfig FileInfo
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    </Directory>
Be sure to hit Control-O (letter o) to write out the file then Control-X to exit the pico editor. Note that I have enabled some options, like ExecCGI to allow .cgi files to run, and Authconfig and FileInfo so some useful .htaccess methods work. You could dumb it down and say AllowOverride none like the default settings.
Once you have created the yourusername.conf file, you will have to change the ownership to system:wheel. However, oddly enough, you can't chown system, you have to chown root. So the command will look like this:
    sudo chown root:wheel /private/etc/apache2/users/yourusername.conf
You can put other directives here that will only apply to this user. Try to avoid modifying httpd.conf, it's easy to mess up globally and it can be hard to fix if you break it.

Answer 1

Howdy, I was having the same problem you were having, until I noticed that I had placed some incompatible File Sharing settings on my home folder. Specifically, I had placed No Access for the 'everyone' group, which is the group that Apache uses.
Thus, even though my ~/Sites folder had "public" permissions, the enclosing folder (~/) had even more restrictive permissions so Apache couldn't serve anything from it.
Check to see if you've enabled any custom File Sharing permissions on your home (or Sites) directory in the Sharing preference pane.
hth.
Message was edited by: Wesley Miyazaki [corrected OS version]