Apache 2 on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 issue on upgrade
This weekend I decided to arrange my hard drive in a way that I could have a 5GB partition with sinful Windows XP to play some games with the family. To do that, I bought a 1TB external hard drive to use as a Time Machine backup for the process. At the time, my disk was already partitioned for Ubuntu but since I didn’t find it useful anymore, I replaced it for Windows.
Well, the good thing is I can actually play some old games like Empire Earth and Counter-Strike with the cousins to have some fun. The bad news is my Apache server settings screwed up. Two things happened. Number one: http://localhost/~user was thrown a 403 Forbidden access. This problem is the result of the user configurations for the server whilst the reinstallation / upgrade of the system, they don’t exist now. What you have to do is very simple. Go to /private/etc/apache2/users and create a file yourshortusername.conf and type this:
Options Indexes MultiViews AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all
Restart your server and you’re ready to go!
Number two: My virtual hosts blew away. I should have kept a record on how to do this in case I had to a reinstallation, I guess I can kick myself now. (I’m solving this as I write this post 
) Three steps:
- Go to /private/etc/hosts and say you want to assign 127.0.0.1 to your alias, like this: 127.0.0.1 youralias
- Go to /private/etc/apache2 and uncomment the line that includes the virtual hosts configuration file. If you want to use PHP, you might want to uncomment the line that includes it as well.
- Finally, go to /private/etc/apache2/extra and edit the httpd-vhosts.conf mentioned on 2. and add this chunk of code:
DocumentRoot "/path/to/your/site/" ServerAlias yoursitename ServerName yoursitename
Restart your server and virtual hosts are up and running.