403 Forbidden : You don't have permission to access in wordpress

Question

I'm trying to do a website for an university association. For that we are using the university servers. We have had a website, but we were trying to change the website from neqist.ist.utl.pt/~neqist.daemons/site/ to neqist.ist.utl.pt/.

In the server we have a "public" folder, a "web" folder and a "yesterday" folder, the last one beeing a backup folder, i think.

In the "web" folder we had a "site" folder where we had the wordpress set-up. For doing what we wanted to do I just changed the wordpress files from the "site" folder to the folder above, "web", and erased a index.php file that only had the following code :

When acessing the site neqist.ist.utl.pt we have the following error:

**Forbidden**

You don't have permission to access /~neqist.daemon/ on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.4.25 (Debian) Server at neqist.ist.utl.pt Port 80

What I tried

• put the wordpress files at the same level of the "public", "web" and "yesterday" folder, this is, right at the /neqist folder in the university servers. Same error appears.

• create the "site" folder again in the "web" folder and putting the wordpress files back in, but the error still appears

I'm an ammateur in this matter, I use filezilla and I connect with the port 22 for sftp, since the university doesn't allow me to connect just with ftp

Answer 1

What you should check:

• Do you have SSH access to the server? As you use SFTP, you probably have.
• where your web server (Nginx or Apache) is pointing. To find the correct directory where to put Wordpress in.
• change Wordpress file permissions: chown -R them to the web server user (usually www-data or nginx-fpm ), and chmod -R 755 them
• if you imported an old database, make sure to edit your wp-config.php file to match new server database credentials and database name
• if it's a new site, you have to know your database name and credentials to set your site up. Ask your system admin or your service provider dashboard. You can then use the WP install wizard.
• If the web server configuration, PHP, and path are OK, you should see your site or a database connection error
• if nothing worked, put a simple index.php with a php_info(); at the root directory to check that web server and path are correct for your URL.