I am doing some testing and have installed PHP 5 on a development server. I had a site installed on the server that was working correctly, complete with quite an elaborate .htaccess file handling many redirects and rules. However, after installing PHP5 it turns out any php file I tried to view just returned a 403 Forbidden error. I began to scratch my head. Searching on Google didn't immediately bring up a solution either. However, I eventually narrowed it down to the fact that I needed to add Options +FollowSymLinks to my .htaccess file. That solved it all. :)
Just a quick one but hopefully it will help others in moments of panic.
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Here is the proper way to troubleshoot that error: A. Error code start 4xx is generated because of client browser request. A 403 error code means client browser (or person who is trying to access your site) cannot access the requested URL. It can be caused by many reason a) A 403 status code indicates that the client cannot access the requested resource. It means the wrong username and password were sent in the request, or that the permissions on the server do not allow what was being asked. b) No default directory index page is present. Upload Index.html or Index.htm file. Directive DirectoryIndex defines the default index page name. Open your apache configuration file, find out default index file name, and upload the same file to directory: DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml c) Make sure the CGI script requested have executable permissions set on files. Use chmod command to set permission: $ chmod x file.cgi d) Make sure you have permission to use .htaccess file for Apache web server. If Apache has overrides, disabled you will bump back with a 403 error.
Written on Friday, February 1, 2008 at 20:27hrs by T1 Lines