Fixing 403 Forbidden Issue: OSX + Passenger Preference Pane + Apache

I recently installed the Passenger Preferences Pane from Finger Tips. This is a great way to run a Rails app in a local development environment on a Mac.

During the install process I did nothing different or flash, just followed the instructions.

After trying to hit the URL for my local app for the first time, I got this error message:

[error] [client 127.0.0.1] (13)Permission denied: access to / denied

I followed all the Google I could find about checking the directive was correct, and also that the permissions of my project dir were 755. They were.

After some more ‘advanced’ Google, I found this gem of a comment, which points out that every level of the entire path to your project needs to have appropriate (something like 755) permissions.

E.g, if the path to your project is /usr/local/apps/foo:

chmod 755 /usr
chmod 755 /usr/local
chmod 755 /usr/local/apps
chmod 755 /usr/local/apps/foo

This fixed the problem for me, without the need to restart anything.

-Jonathan