HTTP 403 error on site hosted on OS X Snow Leopard

I suddenly started getting http 403 errors on my self hosted [with native apache installation] site that worked perfectly until Feb 5th 2010. The errors showing up in the access log looked like:

[Fri Feb 19 02:05:25 2010] [crit] [client 127.0.0.1] (13)Permission denied: /Users/username/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable, referer: http://127.0.0.1/

I’m not sure what changed, perhaps an OS X update from Apple, but after restoring all /private/etc/apache2/* files and the my /Users/username/Sites/ folder via TimeMachine to a date when things were working it still wouldn’t play ball.

Eventually I came across the soultion, it seems the chmod levels of the default folders had changed so doing the following in Terminal:

chmod 701 ~
chmod 705 ~/Sites

Solved everything…phew

One Reply to “HTTP 403 error on site hosted on OS X Snow Leopard”

  1. Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks! I decided to move my Sites folder to my dropbox so I can manage my local sites across machines and was getting this error. Now everything is working again.

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