Comments on: Mac OS X 10.5: Web Sharing – “Forbidden 403″ on http://localhost/~username

By: Mwandha Mufumbiro

Mwandha Mufumbiro — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:59:53 +0000

your post is exceptional after timewasting in searches i got to your solution and believe me you it works magic.

By: Mark A Sanderson

Mark A Sanderson — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:02:45 +0000

Thanks for all the help here. I checked all the points and my Mac personal website STILL didn’t work.

Disclaimer in order, I do code for a living and I “bent” my environment a bit more than I should. After I checked all the pointers above, my site still didn’t work. Ultimately, I did figure it out.

Here’s the check list I’d follow:

1. Make sure httpd.conf switch is configured properly with

AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

2. Make sure your personal user ID config file .conf is configrued in the same manner:

AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

3. Then make sure your user directory is set to “Read Only” for “everyone”. At first, this faked me out because I didn’t want everyone to have read only access. However I then made a new ID to see how that was setup. As it turns out, making your ~ user ID home set in that manner isn’t a problem because it only affects your Sites and Public subdirectories. All other subdirectories are set to “no access”

Once that was set properly… all works fine again.

Good Luck

By: mootoh

mootoh — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:50:00 +0000

Thanks for this tip.

I recommend to use “Allow from localhost” instead of “Allow from all” if you want to see the site only from your computer, because giving an access to the computer in the network could bring some troubles.

By: aadfaas

aadfaas — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:51:04 +0000

What worked for me was changing my username.conf so that it read like this:

Options Indexes Multiviews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

By: Tom Boutell

Tom Boutell — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:59:10 +0000

Yes, the Sites folder does have to be readable and executable by ‘_www’ and the sensible way to set that up on a personal machine is to make it readable and executable by everyone.

But it is not true that it cannot be writable by everyone. It’s certainly not true that making it writable by everyone will cause Apache to refuse to work on Linux systems also as Carlos suggested. If that were true frameworks like Symfony that generate .php files on the fly and reuse them for performance reasons later would not work.

There might be a system somewhere that refuses to work when it sees that the document root is writable, but I just tested this in Snow Leopard and it’s fine there.

By: Olivier

Olivier — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:10:14 +0000

yes ! thanks to everybody, but specially to Lt Hammer Says (19).
My home directory was not readable for all. That was my problem. !

By: Lt. Hammer

Lt. Hammer — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:24:03 +0000

Modifying the httpd.conf file should be a last resort.
Try Greg’s method first. If that doesn’t work, Get Info on your home folder. In the “Ownership and…” pane, click the lock and authenticate if necessary. Give “everyone” “read-only” access. Leave the ‘Ignore ownership…’ box unchecked. I have FileVault on. I assume it should work with FV off. Good Luck : ^ })

By: solak

solak — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:18:19 +0000

This shell script will do the whole task. Just give it the usernames on the command line.
You may have to repair the line breaks or formatting if the forum software mangles the text in its effort to be helpful.

#! /bin/sh
# Create web sharing conf file for the users specified as command-line parameters.
echo
for name in $*
do
if [ -n "$name" ] ; then
echo creating $name.conf
cat > /tmp/$name$$.conf << END

Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

END
sudo mv /tmp/$name$$.conf /etc/apache2/users/$name.conf
sudo chown root:wheel /etc/apache2/users/$name.conf
fi
done

echo
echo “Restarting apache webserver.”
sudo httpd -k restart
echo “Done.”

By: John Barrett

John Barrett — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 04:44:24 +0000

Thanks so much I just got a replacement for my macbook pro, and was gong crazy trying to figure out why in the world was the localhost/~myusername not working, and thanks to you I can play with the localhost again.

I searched for about 2 hours on Google, but could not find the information.

Thanks so much, your rock dude!
Johnny

By: Paddy

Paddy — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:35:33 +0000

brilliant works great thanks again!