Upgrading to Mountain Lion: Forbidden 403, You don’t have permission to access /~username/ on this server

July 27, 2012 by John Attebury | 9 Comments

One of these days I’m going to research OS X upgrades before the fact. One of these days.

After upgrading to Mountain Lion my local websites did not run anymore. I received a nice little “403 Forbidden Error”.

A quick GIS revealed that this was common knowledge, but the same GIS quickly found a fix.

Neil Gee’s Forbidden 403, You don’t have permission to access /~username/ on this server pointed me in the right direction, but my websites still didn’t work.

Changing Neil’s settings for my username.conf from

<Directory "/Users/username/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

<Directory "/Users/username/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Directory>

worked for me. (I use a lot of symlinks and Dropbox in my workflow.)

http://twitter.com/morksinaanab Harrie van der Lubbe

Thanks man, this worked for me, as I used symlinks as well in some projects
http://twitter.com/mjnetch Marc Juchli

Thank you!
Symfony 2 uses symlinks as well…! I guess you’ll help a lot of guys out there with this.
http://twitter.com/gumdal Raj Pawan

Any other reasons you could think of for the same forbidden error? I have tried your solution and am still getting the error. I have also set the permissions for my new web directory to read write but still no luck.
- http://johnattebury.com John Attebury
  
  Hi Raj,
  
  Have you taken a look at your error logs? Are any sites you host working for you?
  
  I’ve occasionally had problems with the permissions on the files in the web directory.
http://twitter.com/Blackoasissun Jochen Schneider

Many thx, helped me a lot!
Jamie Rushworth

I LOVE YOU! I’ve spent way too long trying to figure out this 403 error!
Volkan Ozyilmaz

Очень спасибо!
http://twitter.com/robertvalencia Robert Valencia

this saved my life!! thanks!
violetk13

Posting here since I had trouble with this even after following the instructions above. The steps in this post on stack overflow solved it for me: http://superuser.com/questions/158792/403-forbidden-error-on-mac-os-x-localhost
It was a permissions issue. Hope that helps someone else.