403 Forbidden Every Single Time Permalinks Setting Changed

Let me preface this by saying totally new to WP, having migrated over from the Joomla world. While there is a lot more under the Joomla hood that I miss, I can dig the lean and mean core of WP so far (though having to install plugins to set page-level “widgets” seems odd).

Nonetheless, I am just rolling up my sleeves and trying to understand how things work; I start by installing on a localhost and playing around until I break something beyond repair with my VERY limited WP knowledge base, then wash, rinse, and repeat. ??

One thing I can’t figure out, though, is the 403 Forbidden error it fires every single time I try to change the permalinks settings to ‘post name.’ I can replicate this every single time (fresh install, instantly navigate to permalinks, toggle ‘post name’, save, boom—it blows up.

I am on a localhost running MAMP and Apache mod_rewrite module is loaded and good to go.

When it fires the error, I can’t get a single WP page to compile, of course…no admin, dashboard, nothing. The only way I can fix this is to delete the .htaccess file.

Once I get back in without the .htaccess file, I go to permalinks and change the settings for some more pretty URLs and boom—403 forbidden.

Here’s the seemingly bad .htaccess that is generated…but since this is reproducible, it clearly must be me and something to do with Apache? ??

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wordpress/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Here are my loaded modules (showing that I have mod_rewrite going…just a vanilla MAMP installation):

core mod_win32 mpm_winnt http_core mod_so mod_actions mod_alias mod_asis mod_auth_basic mod_auth_digest mod_authn_anon mod_authn_dbd mod_authn_dbm mod_authn_file mod_authnz_ldap mod_authz_dbm mod_authz_groupfile mod_authz_host mod_authz_owner mod_authz_user mod_autoindex mod_cache mod_cern_meta mod_cgi mod_charset_lite mod_dav mod_dav_fs mod_dav_lock mod_dbd mod_deflate mod_dir mod_dumpio mod_env mod_expires mod_ext_filter mod_file_cache mod_filter mod_headers mod_ident mod_imagemap mod_include mod_info mod_isapi util_ldap mod_logio mod_log_config mod_log_forensic mod_mime mod_mime_magic mod_negotiation mod_proxy mod_proxy_ajp mod_proxy_balancer mod_proxy_connect mod_proxy_ftp mod_proxy_http mod_proxy_scgi mod_reqtimeout mod_rewrite mod_setenvif mod_speling mod_ssl mod_status mod_substitute mod_unique_id mod_userdir mod_usertrack mod_version mod_vhost_alias mod_fcgid mod_authn_default mod_authz_default mod_disk_cache mod_wsgi mod_perl mod_php7

• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Terp. Reason: Changed "I can" to "I can't" :)
• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Terp.