Apache doesn't serve files in "javascript" directory. Why?

Question

All of the sudden I started getting 404s for files like http://example.localhost/javascript/jquery.min.js

Earlier everything was working just fine. I didn't change any configs, at least not manually.

But now if I'd try to access the /javascript directory itself I would get "Cannot serve directory /usr/share/javascript/: No matching DirectoryIndex (index.html,index.cgi,index.pl,index.php,index.xhtml,index.htm) found, and server-generated directory index forbidden by Options directive in the Apache error log.

Answer 1

I was trying to find solution to this on Stack Overflow, but I couldn't. So I'm just leaving this here if anyone happens to encounter the same problem.

So why the hell would it look in the /usr/share/javascript instead of what I had configured in the VirtualHost. To figure that out I did something like the following:

$ cd /etc/apache2
$ grep -R Alias * | grep share

...
conf-enabled/javascript-common.conf:Alias /javascript /usr/share/javascript/
...

After googling for that configuration file name I found some explanation.

I don't know why, but I had the javascript-common package installed. It doesn't seem harmful to get rid of it, so doing $ sudo apt-get purge javascript-common solved the problem for me.

Answer 2

You don't need to edit the conf file or purge the package just disable it.

a2disconf javascript-common
service apache2 reload

If for some reason you want to use that conf:

a2enconf javascript-common
service apache2 reload