Apache VirtualHost on Ubuntu 11.04

Question

I'm trying to set up an Apache Virtual Host for local development on a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.04. Here's my virtual host config inside /sites-available:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName morpho.local
ServerAlias www.morpho.local
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /home/james/projects/morpho

# Log file
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/morpho.local-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

I've added the symlink in /sites-enabled and restarted Apache. The document root contains a dummy "Hello World" index.html and nothing else. The www-data user is the owner of the directory and the index.html.

I get a 403 Forbidden when I browse to morpho.local, and this line is written (twice) to the Apache error log:

(13)Permission denied: /home/james/projects/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: 
  unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

This seems weird to me, because it's looking for a .htaccess file one directory up from the document root. Just to see what would happen, I created a .htaccess in that directory, and gave it 777 permissions and set owner and group to www-data. Same error in the log.

My guess is that I've missed something I need to do with permissions, but the fact that it's looking for a .htaccess one directory back is confusing.

Again, this is a fresh Ubuntu/Apache install and I haven't configured anything besides this single Virtual Host.

---

Edit: I got it working by setting the x permission on my dev folder, /home/james/projects. This allowed the www-data Apache user to see inside the directory. I'll try ghm1014's setup from the answers because that seems like a better solution. Although it seems like it would still require the x permission in order for www-data to follow the symlink, so I don't know if it gets around having to set that or not.

Thanks for your answers, regardless.

Answer 1

You have to give permissions to access the document root in your configuration. Put something like this inside the VirtualHost entry.

<Directory />
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory> 

Answer 2

Home directory is not a good directory to place www-doc files. Since /home/ directory has no x permissions (navigate) to other users. Adding this permission means any user will be able to see your personal information. I would recommend this:

• Make a directory anywhere where apache can read:

  mkdir /var/www/html/

• Then create a symlink to your real directory:

  ln -s /home/james/projects/morpho /var/www/html/

• Change your DocumentRoot and add follow symlink option

  DocumentRoot /home/james/projects/morpho

  Options FollowSymLinks