Directory index forbidden by Options directive

Question

I'm using the dompdf plugin for codeigniter: http://codeigniter.com/wiki/PDF_generation_using_dompdf/

to generate pdfs from a form. This works on localhost, but on the live server I get this in the error log:

Directory index forbidden by Options directive: /var/www/vhosts/domain.co.uk/httpdocs/mm/userdata/account1/invoices/ 

Any idea what this means? I've searched for answers, and found a few that suggest editing the httpd.conf, however I don't have access to this.

I've also tried adding a blank index.html file to the root and document directory (as also suggested elsewhere, but to no avail).

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Either the main httpd.conf or the .htaccess file in this directory or a nearby parent directory probably includes:

Options -Indexes 

Your host may have to set it to +Indexes if you don't have access in .htaccess and want to list & browse the directory contents, absent a default index.html, index.php, etc. If the directory should not have a default file and you don't enable Indexes, you may only directly target the filenames of contents within it.

The Indexes option is commonly disabled by default on many Apache installations.

Full details are available in the Apache core documentation on Options

Answer 2

It means there's no default document in that directory (index.html, index.php, etc...). On most webservers, that would mean it would show a listing of the directory's contents. But showing that directory is forbidden by server configuration (Options -Indexes)