Server unable to read htaccess file, denying acces

Question

I have created a simple app using AngularJS. When I tried to host that project in my website http://demo.gaurabdahal.com/recipefinder it shows the following error:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /recipefinder on this server. Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe

But if I go to http://demo.gaurabdahal.com/ it displays "access denied" message as expected, that I have printed. But why is it unable to open that AngularJS projects "recipefinder". If I tried to put a simple HTML app there, it opens just fine.

The same AngularJS project works fine when I host that in github (http://gaurabdahal.github.io/recipefinder)

I can't understand what's wrong.

Answer 1

In my case apache was somehow configured wrong so I had to set permissions to all parent dirs too. Just setting permission to .htaccess (and it's parent dir) didn't work.

Answer 2

GoDaddy shared server solution

Basically, I had the same issue when trying to deploy separate Laravel project on a subdomain level.

File structure

- public_html (where the main web app resides)
    [works fine]

    - booking.mydomain.com (folder for separate Laravel project)
        [showing error 403 forbidden]

Solution

1. go to cPanel of your GoDaddy account
2. open File Manager
3. browse to the folder that shows 403 forbidden error
4. in the File Manager, right-click on the folder (in my case booking.mydomain.com)
5. select Change Permissions

6. select following checkboxes

   a) user - read, write, execute
   b) group - read, execute
   c) world - read, execute
   
   Permission code must display as 755
   

7. Click change permissions

Job done!

Answer 3

Just my solution. I had extracted a file, had some minor changes, and got the error above. Deleted everything, uploaded and extracted again, and normal business.

Answer 4

You need to run these commands in /var/www/html/ or any other directory that your project is on:

sudo chgrp -R group ./
sudo chown -R user:group ./
find ./ -type d -exec chmod 755 -R {} \;
find ./ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

In my case (apache web server) I use www-data for user and group

Answer 5

"Server unable to read htaccess file" means just that. Make sure that the permissions on your .htaccess file are world-readable.