set up /var/www to be a link to my dropbox ?

[Findarato]

Hello everyone,

I have recently installed dropbox and wanted to share my laptop and desktop development folders.
I thought I could simply replace my /var/www with a symlink to /home/username/Dropbox/www, but when I do that, I get the following error:
You don't have permission to access /www on this server.

I have already given myself ALL the possible rights on this folder, but it won't solve the error. Does anyone have an idea ?

Thank you very much,

Findarato

[Bachstelze]

You must add a <Directory> entry for /home/username/Dropbox/www to your Apache configuration allowing access to it. Since it's outside /var/www, access is denied by default.

Or you cound bind it to /var/www: sudo mount -o bind /home/username/Dropbox/www /var/www, but be sure to remove your symlink before and create /var/www as a regular, empty directory.

[Findarato]

Could you please tell me how that would look ?

My current /etc/apache2/sites-available/default looks like this :

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

DocumentRoot /var/www
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined

Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>

</VirtualHost>

Also, I would like databases to be shared in the same way. Which file would I have to edit and how ?

[Bachstelze]

If you aren't going to use /var/www, you could as well move your DocumentRoot to /home/username/Dropbox/www. Just replace every occurrence of /var/www in your file with /home/username/Dropbox/www. Can't help you with databases.

[Findarato]

If you aren't going to use /var/www, you could as well move your DocumentRoot to /home/username/Dropbox/www. Just replace every occurrence of /var/www in your file with /home/username/Dropbox/www. Can't help you with databases.

I already tried that, but I get exactly the same error

[Bachstelze]

Does Apache have read permission to the directory?

[Findarato]

yup, rights are set to 777

[Bachstelze]

Well, I guess we won't go through every possible cause one at a time. Post yur logs. ;)

[Findarato]

Here you go :)


[Sat Sep 19 21:50:49 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] (13)Permission denied: access to /index.php denied
[Sat Sep 19 21:50:49 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] (13)Permission denied: access to /index.xhtml denied
[Sat Sep 19 21:50:49 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] (13)Permission denied: access to /index.htm denied
[Sat Sep 19 21:51:06 2009] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sat Sep 19 21:51:07 2009] [notice] Apache/2.2.11 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.6-3ubuntu4.2 with Suhosin-Patch configured -- resuming normal operations
[Sat Sep 19 21:51:46 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /var/www/www2


Only the last line is relevant, the other lines refer to my testing of other solutions :)

[Findarato]

Problem solved, I had to give 755 permissions on my /user folder...