permission problems (403) with bugzilla using apache
 

i just installed bugzilla and i keep getting permission errors when trying to access the bugzilla dir. I can access the localhost default page w/out problems.

I followed all the instructions in the manual regarding setting the owner of the bugzilla files to the apache user:

chown -R nobody.nogroup /usr/local/bugzilla

In my case the user is 'nobody' which is the default for the apache installed from source. But I still get the 403 error. I also tried ttilt.ttilt (my username) to no avail. I've run checksetup on the bugzilla dir as root and that doesn't help. The permissions on the index.cgi are the default (750), and after checksetup is run the owner is set to 'root' and group 'nogroup', which is the group used by apache.

The $webservergroup in localconfig is set to 'nogroup' as well.

As per the manual, I have

<Directory "bugzilla">
Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride Limit
</Directory>

in the httpd.conf.

bugzilla is a symlink in htdocs pointing to /usr/local/bugzilla.

NOW we got a real problem going, let's see if anyone can figure this out.

JC

do you change the /usr/local/bugzilla permissions to 755?

If you want to publish via Apache, you need setup the directory permissions to 755.

But is unsafe to publish some from /usr/local. Try to install bugzilla in other directory (/var/www or a directory under the httpd installation.

PROBLEM FIXED (read for tricky problem)
 

Thanks for the help but I figured out the problem..

turned out that the

<Directory "bugzilla">
Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride Limit
</Directory>

was wrong, because even though there was a "bugzilla" symlink under /usr/local/apache2/htdocs pointing to /usr/local/bugzilla, apache doesn't allow to just say "bugzilla" in the directory directive.

Likewise, the following is wrong:

<Directory "/usr/local/bugzilla">
Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride Limit
</Directory>

which is what I had earlier. The only way that is acceptable by apache is:

<Directory "/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/bugzilla">
Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride Limit
</Directory>

Which is specifying the actual symlink with a full path, not just a relative path and not where it points to.

This is a very tricky problem that I haven't heard of before, so I hope this serves as a solution to someone else w/ the same problem.

JC