Apache VirtualHost from user directory on Amazon EC 2

Question

I'm coming from a non-cloud hosting background on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and/or CentOS and trying to set up an apache (2.2) server with Amazon EC2. I typically host my files from a user's home directory and create a virtualhost like so:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName userdomain.com
  DocumentRoot /home/myuser/public_html
  <Directory /home/myuser/public_html>
    AllowOverride All
    <Limit DELETE>
      Order Deny,Allow
      Deny from All
    </Limit>
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

However on Amazon EC2 that doesn't seem to work at all no matter how I sent the file permissions.

Is this something that just isn't allowed? Do I have to host files from /var/www? What am I missing?

Answer 1

It turns out Linux had SELinux enabled, which I have not encountered before.

The simplest solution was to put it in "permissive" mode as described at https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Security-Enhanced_Linux/sect-Security-Enhanced_Linux-Enabling_and_Disabling_SELinux-Disabling_SELinux.html