mjhjmtu

I've got a brand new CentOS 6 installation, which has a symlink in the document root to my development files:

[root@localhost html]# ls -l
total 4
-rwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 0 Sep 18 20:16 index.html
-rwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 17 Sep 18 20:16 index.php
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 24 Sep 18 20:19 refresh-app -> /home/billy/refresh-app/

My httpd.conf has this:

<Directory "/">
 Options All
 AllowOverride None
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
</directory>

The target of the symbolic link has permissions which should allow apache to read anything it wants:

 [root@localhost billy]# ls -l
total 40 (Some entries were omitted because the list was too long
drwxr-xr-x. 7 billy billy 4096 Sep 18 20:03 refresh-app

I've also tried disabling SELinux by changing /etc/selinux/conf:

SELINUX=disabled

Yet no matter what I do, when someone tries to go to that link, http://localhost/refresh-app/, I get a 403 FORBIDDEN error page and this is written in the /var/log/httpd/error_log:

Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible

Why can't Apache access the target of the symlink?

Found the issue. Turns out, Apache wants access to not just the directory I'm serving, /home/billy/refresh-app/, but also every directory above that, namely /home/billy/, /home, and /. (I have no idea why... giving someone access to a subdirectory shouldn't require giving away permissions to everything above that subdirectory....)

I would guess it's looking for .htaccess or something, or perhaps *nix being strange about how it treats permissions for directory transversal.

I had a similar problem where I had the following configuration which used to work with Ubuntu 10, but stopped working with Ubuntu 14 (Apache 2.4):

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs>
 Options +FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

Switching to this sorted the problem (even though the web server user wasn't able to directly access the symlink)

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs>
 Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymlinks -SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
</Directory>

From what I can tell its just the -SymLinksIfOwnerMatch setting and has something to do with changes in Apache 2.4 but I haven't tried researching the exact cause.

I also thought it could be down to openbase_dir restrictions in PHP but it wasn't that.

This error can also be caused if you are linking to an encrypted folder.

It appears "FollowSymLinks" is the option you need in httpd.conf. It is detailed here. Looks like you might need a rule in htdocs too...but it's the option you need.

You may also want to check if selinux is enforced or not.
On RedHat/Fedora, execute this:

getenforce

If the response is 'Enforcing', you may want to execute

setenforce 0

and try the url again in your browser.

Note that I am not saying that disabling selinux is the best way to solve this problem, but it may help to identify the cause.

Options +FollowSymLinks

Create a .htaccess file with this did the trick for me (put it in a dir before the symlink).

that what solve my problem after allow all permission and allow followsymlink
"
In the case of FollowSymLinks specifically it MUST be inside a Directory structure when within a .conf file. From the Apache current manual

The FollowSymLinks and SymLinksIfOwnerMatch Options work only in
sections or .htaccess files.

answer from here