Lighttpd 403 Forbidden for PHP files

Question

I've just installed lighttpd on my dedicated server, mod_fastcgi is enabled, so I've appended the following lines to the lighttpd.conf file:

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
( "localhost" =>
                     (
                        "socket" => "/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket",
                        "bin-path" => "/usr/local/bin/php-cgi"
                      )
                   )
)

But it still doesn't help, since I'm getting the 403 - Forbidden message when I try to enter a PHP file in my web browser... When I delete the index.php file from my web root directory and place the index.html there, then everything is fine, and there are no errors, no matter if index.php file has 100 lines or just one - <?php echo 'test'; ?> it always is showing up an 403 - Forbidden, I'm out of ideas now.

Why does it happend?

ls -la of my web root directory:

#
total 6

    drwxr-xr-x  15 root  wheel   1536 Jul 18 10:23 .
    drwxr-xr-x   4 root  wheel    512 Jul 18 08:45 ..
    drwxr-xr-x   2 www   www      512 Jul  1 02:36 cache
    drwxr-xr-x   2 www   www      512 Jul  1 02:36 config
    drwxr-xr-x   6 www   www      512 Jul  1 02:36 inc
-rw-r--r--   1 www   www        9 Jul 18 11:02 index.php

Answer 1

Your php is not configured correctly. check your lighttpd error.log it will state something like:

(mod_fastcgi.c.1397) [ERROR]: spawning fcgi failed. 

i use:

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => ((                                      
                     "bin-path" => "/bin/php-cgi",             
                     "socket" => "/tmp/php.socket",              
                     "max-procs" => 1,                                     
                     "bin-environment" => (                         
                       "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "16",                    
                       "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "10000"           
                     ),         
                     "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable"
                 )))   

make sure that fastcgi is enabled in modules.conf

server.modules = (
  "mod_access",
  "mod_fastcgi",
#  "mod_alias",
#  "mod_auth",
#  "mod_evasive",
#  "mod_redirect",
#  "mod_rewrite",
#  "mod_setenv",
#  "mod_usertrack",
)

Answer 2

Same issue, the fix for Mint was install php5-cgi package.
sudo apt-get install php5-cgi
enable fastcgi modules
sudo lighttpd-enable-mod fastcgi fastcgi-php
and finally reload
sudo service lighttpd force-reload

Answer 3

I had the same issue. The fix was as simple as moving the config files so there were enabled. All I did was...

$ ln -s /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-fastcgi.conf /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/
$ ln -s /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/15-fastcgi-php.conf /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/

and reload...

$ service lighttpd force-reload