Mercurial Apache Web Access Gives Me 403 Forbidden Access

Question

after trying to enable mercurial apache web access on my Ubuntu Server 12.04 box, I've got a 403 Forbidden error when accessing http://my.site.com/mercurial with log:

[Tue Sep 04 01:20:22 2012] [error] [client X.X.X.X] client denied by server configuration: /mercurial/hgweb.cgi

I have added this to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

    ScriptAliasMatch ^/mercurial(.*) /mercurial/hgweb.cgi$1
    <Directory /var/www/mercurial>
            Options Indexes FollowSymlinks MultiViews ExecCGI
            Options None
            AllowOverride All
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
            AuthType Basic
            AuthName "Repositorio Mercurial"
            AuthUserFile /mercurial/hgusers
            Require valid-user
    </Directory>

This is strange, but apache does't asks me for password when trying to access the web server folder

[web] 
style = gitweb

[collections] 
/mercurial/repositories = /mercurial/repositories

/mercurial/hgwebconfig.cgi (on filesystem)

config = "/mercurial/hgweb.config"

I have linked /mercurial to /var/www/mercurial

Any advise will be really appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Since you're using /mercurial (on the filesystem) as your script root, you need your authorization configuration there instead of on /var/www/mercurial, despite the fact that /mercurial symlinks to /var/www/mercurial. From the documentation of the Options directive:

Even though the server follows the symlink it does not change the pathname used to match against <Directory> sections.

So, move your access controlling <Directory> block to be for /mercurial - and you'll need a FollowSymLinks on / as well. (By the way, why does it have Options None right after the other Options directive?)

The symlink is making this a lot more complicated and confusing than it needs to be - I'd really recommend getting rid of that and using the /var/www/mercurial filesystem path, which will greatly simplify the situation.