AH00035: access to / denied (filesystem path '/Users/xxx/Documents/workspace') because search permissions are missing on a component of the path

Question

Trying to set localhost on my mac and made following changes in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

DocumentRoot "/Users/xxx/Documents/workspace/firstRepo/htdocs"
<Directory "/Users/xxx/Documents/workspace/firstRepo/htdocs">

I know it's something to do with the dir permission, so I followed suggestions online and ran the following commands:

find /Users/xxx/Documents/workspace -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find /Users/xxx/Documents/workspace -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

No luck here. Can someone help me with this? Thanks.

Answer 1

Unix permissions are not just "permissions in destination", you need "search" permissions for the whole path until the last directory as the message from Apache says

Search permissions means, in a simple explanation, "x" is at least missing in directories so the unpriviledged user apache is using can go the whole path until reaching "/Users/xxx/Documents/workspace/firstRepo/htdocs".

You can try this command to make sure you have them:

namei -mol /Users/xxx/Documents/workspace/firstRepo/htdocs

Only other case of not being able to access where permissions are correct is if SELinux is controlling access to those directories.

The Apache wiki has a document about this since many people get confused about how permissions work under Unix. Permissions