Question

"Forbidden - You don't have permission to access / on this server" Error

I followed the virtual hosts tutorial and set up apache for my domain name aditidentalcare.com. The website was loading perfectly but now I am suddenly getting this error.

Forbidden - You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

I don’t understand why!

Here is the aditidentalcare.com.conf

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin jogi@smashingpixels.in ServerName aditidentalcare.com ServerAlias www.aditidentalcare.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/sites/aditidentalcare.com/public_html ErrorLog /error.log CustomLog /access.log combined </VirtualHost>

The permission for public_html is set to 750 and the owner:group is jogi:www-data

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Jonathan Tittle • January 7, 2017
Accepted Answer

@joginayak

You need to use chmod 755 instead of 750 on directories. Using 750 equates to users having read, write, and execute, groups having read and execute, and finally, world (i.e your visitors) having absolutely zero access, thus they will be forbidden from accessing and/or viewing the contents.

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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• January 22, 2021

Hello,

One more thing that I could suggest in addition to what already has been mentioned is that you could also check the user that your Apache service is running as and change the owner of your files:

  • Check the user that Apache is running with:
ps aux | grep -i apache

In most cases, it would be www-data unless it was changed.

  • After that once you have the user run:
chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/

Make sure to change the www-data user if this is not the one that your Apache service is running as.

Regards, Bobby

Tom Jansen • December 29, 2019

@srjcooldude @kasidkhan

if you were using a wordpress site, it could have quite possibly been caused by a corrupt .htaccess file. the simple fix is to resave permalinks twice in order to regenerate .htaccess.

you might be seeing the below error messages:

  1. “The REST API encountered an unexpected result” in site health
  2. “Publishing failed and invalid JSON response” upon updating or publishing posts or pages
  3. “Forbidden You don’t have permission to access this resource. Apache/2.4.41 (Ubuntu) Server at Port 80” when viewing posts or pages

br, tom