These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

It sounds like you’ve already done quite a bit of the setup, which is awesome!

A “403 Forbidden†error usually points to a permissions issue or a configuration setting in Apache. Let’s go through a few things to troubleshoot and get your site up and running:

Make sure that the files in your web directory ( by default) are accessible by the Apache user (). You can adjust the permissions with the following commands:

This ensures that Apache can read and execute the files.

Check your Apache configuration file to make sure everything is set up correctly. You’ll want to ensure that the is pointing to the correct directory and that you’ve allowed access:

After making changes, don’t forget to restart Apache:

If you’ve just updated your DNS settings, remember that DNS changes can take some time to propagate. You can check if the DNS records are correctly pointing to your droplet’s IP using a tool like whatsmydns.net.

If you’re using an file, make sure it doesn’t have any rules that could be causing the 403 error. Sometimes, misconfigured files can restrict access unintentionally.

Ensure that the necessary Apache modules are enabled, especially if you’re using it for URL rewriting. You can enable it with:

Check your firewall settings to ensure that traffic on port 80 (HTTP) is allowed:

Finally, if you’re still having trouble, check the Apache error logs for more details:

The logs can give you specific hints about what might be going wrong.