WordPress mod_rewrite returns 403 Forbidden

  • I’ve been looking into this problem for a couple of days now, everyone, and I’m pretty perplexed; mostly because my knowledge of mod_rewrite doesn’t go much farther beyond being able to do simple rewrites.

    When I was working on deploying a comic website using WordPress 1.5, (interesting idea, huh?) I worked on it in “/redesign” until it was all ready to go. Everything worked perfectly, including permalinks, (the archives are an important part of a webcomic!) but when I moved the design to “/” (root) on May 2nd, permalinks died.

    The server was indeed parsing the .htaccess in root, because I was able to get custom error pages and other simple rewrites working, (except fot any that take a virtual directory and rewrite it to index.php – the WordPress ones) but it would return a 403: Forbidden error as if it was actually trying to access a physical directory “/2005“. I don’t understand why it returns a 403 and not a 404, but I have a hunch it has something to do with the way the index files on speakeasy hosting (the hosting company) are parsed.

    From what I’ve found via google on people who have had the same problem with mod_rewrite, their server had some apache mod_rewrite option called ‘FollowSymLinks’ or ‘SymLinksIfOwnerMatch’ turned off by default and they had to enable it by adding “Options +FollowSymLinks” or “Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch” before “RewriteEngine on” in their .htaccess. I’ve tried both of these, to no avail.

    There may be something you can offer, there may be nothing at all — I figure it doesn’t hurt to ask and see if anyone has run into this in the past on certain server configurations. If I can’t figure it out by the weekend, I figure on rewriting the entire directory of “/” to “/redesign“, (because it seems to work fine in there!) but I’m not sure what sort of unforseen consequences could arise from doing this.

    I’m using WordPress 1.5 with only some basic plugins installed (like wp-paginate, text control, two of kitten’s spam plugins, and a few others – nothing that should interfere with permalinks) and the design is located at https://www.dandyandcompany.com, although I’ve got it re-written to “/redesign” as a temporary fix, so you won’t be able to replicate my problem.

    Anyone know anything about this? Thanks in advance.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • I am looking for some similar answers… I can’t get permalinks to work at all on my Apache 1.3 server. With the .haccess file uploaded, I get 403 errors everywhere. If I use the option without mod_rewrite (/index.php/archives/etc), I get 404 errors on my links. I added Options +SymlinksIfOwnerMatch to the htaccess file to no avail. I’m running a Mambo site on this same server with mod_rewrite running and have no problems. I think something in this .htaccess file is not jiving with my server config…
    JF ??

    I seem to be having the same problem. Links that are supposed to be rewritten return a 403. I began developing my site in a subdirectory called /weblog and everything was working perfectly. Then, I moved it up one level to my public_html directory and mod_rewrite seemed to stop working. I was sure to change the webroot setting in wordpress to use the new site root ( https://www.carlos-m.net/ instead of https://www.carlos-m.net/weblog/ ). I even went into the MySQL database and changed all instances of https://www.carlos-m.net/weblog/ to https://www.carlos-m.net/ . However, I still get 403s on addresses that should work. Below are some examples of URLs that work and do not work:

    does not work: https://www.carlos-m.net/category/fiction/

    works: https://www.carlos-m.net/index.php/category/fiction/

    used to work: https://www.carlos-m.net/weblog/category/fiction/

    I used the standard .htaccess generated by WordPress as well as the following, which I found in another forum:

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^.+$ /index.php/$1

    I can provide the .htaccess that WordPress generates if it would be helpful.

    Any help at all would be appreciated. Thanks very much.

    -Los

    Ok, I found a hack that made the problem go away. I’m not really satisfied with this solution, but I may be able to learn to live wit it. If someone has a better solution, I would certainly be interested to know.

    It’s a permissions thing. My public_html directory used to be 701. I changed it to 705 and everything works fine.

    -Los

    FollowSymLinks was disabled in my site’s httpd.conf file. I added:

    <Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    </Directory>

    to the file, deleted the .htaccess file on the site and allowed WP to generate a new .htaccess file by turning on permalink rewriting. I’m using the following structure:

    /%category%/%postname%

    and URL rewriting is now working.

    I have noticed a minor glitch though:

    The Codex states that %category% should not be used on sites that are running versions of Apache below v2. Mine uses 1.3.27. I am using %category% in my permalinks and links to posts work fine, but the links to the categories include the word “category” in the URL:

    https://www.mysite.com/category/mycategoryname/postname

    Note the extra “category” directly following the domain name. Not a terrible side effect though!

    JF ??

    Hi All,

    Yeah, I had the same problem with geting 403 errors. Unfortunately I have shared hosting so I don’t have access to the httpd.conf file. I looked at the error log file and saw the following line:


    [Fri May 26 06:47:25 2006] [error] [client 218.146.252.59] Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden: /home/website/public_html/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll

    So, in the .htaccess in:

    /home/website/public_html/_vti_bin/

    I simply added:

    Options +FollowSymlinks

    Now all is good! Cheers,

    keteracel (Php Expert)

    I had the same problem and it was driving me crazy.

    I just did as Keteracel suggested and added

    Options +FollowSymlinks

    to the .htaccess generated by WordPress instead of adding it to the general .htaccess for the site and it did the trick!

    Thanks to all the posters in this thread.

    i had same problem

    i did above keteracel suggested

    Options +FollowSymlinks

    but its not working

    any other suggestions

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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