WSGI and the 403 Forbidden error

I recently set up a new server so I could deploy an app I’ve been working on.

Because I’m lazy, I simply copied and pasted all the various settings files from an existing app that was running perfectly happily and restarted Apache.

Annoyingly, all I got was 403 Forbidden: You don't have permission to access / on this server and it took me about an hour and a half to work out what was wrong. I eventually found this StackOverflow answer that explained that the newer versions of Apache have slightly different security settings.

I added the line Require all granted to my VirtualHost apache config file, restarted and everything worked perfectly. My new config looks like this now:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName flasktest.subdimension.co.uk

    WSGIDaemonProcess flaskTest user=flask group=www-data threads=5 home=/<redacted>/flaskTest
    WSGIScriptAlias / /<redacted>/flaskTest/flaskTest.wsgi

    <Directory /<redacted>/flaskTest>
        WSGIProcessGroup flaskTest
        WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
        WSGIScriptReloading On
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Posted by Mike Watts On 22 Jun 2014