Joomla installation - access denied 403

Question

I can already tell that I'm probably doing something hideously wrong, but I just can't get anything to work or even acknowledge me.

I have a working Joomla 1.5 site on a localhost setup on a lamp stack with Ubuntu (newest everything). I am working on upgrading the site to a newer version. I've followed the steps on the joomla site, which are simple, just extract the zip file on the server, just like I did for 1.5, and then go to the site. I am doing this in a subdirectory I've called upgrade, physically located at /var/www/upgrade/ and when i try to go to localhost/upgrade, I get a "FORBIDDEN" 403. I tried localhost/upgrade/administrator, localhost/index.php, localhost/administrator/index.php, and even localhost/installation/index.php and nothing works. I went into the installation/ dir and made and saved the configuration.php and .htaccess in upgrade/ to no avail and as a last resort I even did a chmod -R 777 * (yeah I know), restarted apache but nothing changes.

Just to see if it was the install, I dl'd Joomla 3.2 and got the exact same result. All the while my 1.5 site is still happily working. What am I doing wrong?

Asta Asta · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-13T21:25:47

You want to setup a Virtual host for the new site. You can do this with either a port or a host.

So if you have your Apache conf setup correctly you can add another Virtual host with something along the lines of.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/upgrade
    ServerName upgrade.local
</VirtualHost>

You'll also need to add a hosts entry which points to your localhost/IP. Its worth checking out a good guide on setting all this up as theres quite a few steps. The Ubuntu one is pretty good if your on that Distro.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP Specifically the bit on Virtual Hosts

ServerName means that the server will listen for hosts with that name. So, if you have a host such as upgrade.local pointing to your server then the VirtualHost entry will pick that up and point it to the directory /var/www/upgrade.

In order to point a local host to your server you need to add it to your machines hosts file. To add a new host like upgrade.local (you can call it whatever you want) you edit /etc/hosts and set the IP it points to.

127.0.0.1    upgrade.local

ServerName is not mandatory but I find it better as its easier to organise your local host sites.

The alternative is to do it by port (which means you can avoid having to change the hosts file). You need to listen for the port in this case.

Listen 3000

<VirtualHost *:3000>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/upgrade
</VirtualHost>

Joomla installation - access denied 403

1 Answers