Apache 403 error and .htaccess

One you might not be aware of if you don’t read your log files. If you’ve been editing a .htaccess file and you’re getting 403 Forbidden errors on the site, it’s may not be down to some obscure bit of mod_rewrite code it could just be that Apache can’t read you .htaccess file. This shows up the the server error logs thus:

pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

I noticed this when I had some issues with a publishing chain where the .htaccess file kept having it’s Unix permissions changed and becoming unreadable by the Apache daemon - without easy access to the logs it took me quite a while to figure out why I kept getting 403s.

Written on 07 Sep 2009 and categorised in Apache and NIX, tagged as htaccess, 403, and pcfgopenfile

Home, Post archive